12 minute read
Your Attention, Please
Profile of Joel D. Feldman
By Chris Mondics
Joel D. Feldman is 20 minutes into a presentation on distracted driving to a group of parents and their teenage children when he gets to the heart of his talk. He asks the young people how they react when, while on the road, they see a driver in a nearby car texting, oblivious to the very real possibility that their inattention might at any moment cause a crash that could kill or hideously disfigure themselves or others.
They use words like “disrespectful,” “rude” and “selfish.”
When he turns to the parents, though, he gets a different reaction. Theirs, likely reflecting life experience, is more analytical, not so much from the heart. “Risky,” said one. “Dangerous,” said another. “Reckless,” answered a third.
Feldman has given hundreds of such talks, and it is very rare for adults to respond in the more intuitive way of their children. And that, he believes, with plenty of research to back him up, is a key to changing driver habits of texting, talking on a cellphone or other distracted driving practices that cause on average some 3,000 traffic fatalities a year.
“We don’t think it is dangerous when we do it,” Feldman says. But, touching on the peculiar cognitive dissonance that defines distracted driving practices that run the gamut from texting to eating lunch while at the wheel, Feldman adds, “We are angry when we see other people do it.”
Feldman, a personal injury lawyer at Center City Philadelphia’s Anapol Weiss, has come to the subject painfully. His 21-year-old daughter Casey, a beautiful, vivacious communications major at Fordham University, was run over in a crosswalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, by a van on July 17, 2009. She died in the hospital a few hours later.
The driver of the van, a snack deliveryman, who according to the only eyewitness, had rolled through the stop sign, had taken his eyes off the road for a moment as he
Your Attention, Please
apparently reached for his GPS and struck Casey when she was two-thirds of the way through the crosswalk. There was no evidence of drug or alcohol use by the driver, and the call log showed that he was not on the phone at the time.
He was charged with careless driving and failing to yield to a pedestrian.
Casey’s loss was a devastating blow for Feldman, his wife Dianne and their son Brett. It spurred Feldman to take on the subject of distracted driving and, since that time, he’s become a leading national voice on the subject. His efforts, which have been recognized by the federal Department of Transportation, helped spur further research on the subject and galvanized many employers to stress the importance of attentive driving. He and Dianne established the Casey Feldman Foundation and set up the website EndDD.org to deepen public understanding of the harm of distracted driving and to promote ways of persuading the public to put down their phones and pay more attention to the road.
Feldman’s daughter Casey was 21 when she was killed by a distracted driver.
In all, Feldman has given talks to more than 200,000 people since he started the campaign. Other public speakers affiliated with EndDD.org, including hundreds of lawyers, have reached 300,000 more. In Pennsylvania alone, the program has reached more than 68,000 people.
“There are so many more opportunities in Pennsylvania for lawyers to do this kind of work,” Feldman said.
Feldman brings a certain authority and verve to his presentations, and his audience typically is receptive.
He runs the 50-minute sessions as a kind of Socratic dialogue whereby through his posing pointed, thought-provoking questions, the audience members arrive at insights on their own, rather than being force-fed prepackaged information.
He also plays the role of father/confessor.
In each of his talks, Feldman asks the audience whether they’ve ever driven distracted. Typically, several sheepishly raise their hands. He then goes on to explain that he, too, once was a repeat offender. As a personal injury lawyer, he’d spent years taking depositions from drivers who had caused crashes that killed or otherwise harmed clients, and he had tried cases to verdict. But, after leaving the courtroom or the deposition, he often would find himself driving while on his cellphone.
He now makes a pledge every time he drives to stay off his cellphone and give his full attention to the road. He recommends that drivers use the Do Not Disturb setting
Feldman teaches students about the dangers of distracted driving and effective ways to speak up when their driver is distracted.
on their phones or simply place them in Airplane Mode.
Before Casey’s death, Feldman had gone back to graduate school to earn a degree in counseling, the better to understand the trauma and grief his clients had to deal with. “As a parent, I saw their overwhelming grief, but I felt helpless,” he said. “I felt that I needed to do more for my client.”
Casey’s passing only deepened his empathy for clients — and his passion for understanding human behavior.
The paradoxes and contradictions at the heart of human behavior define distracted driving. Ask people whether texting while driving is an acceptable behavior, and most will say no, of course not. Multiple studies have confirmed this. Yet substantial numbers of people do it anyway.
One study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 96% of drivers say talking, reading or typing on a cellphone while driving is extremely dangerous, yet 43% of respondents admitted speaking on a handheld phone while driving, 38% said they had read texts and 29% said they had typed out a text in the 30 days before they were queried.
The question then becomes, if so many think it is a bad idea, why do so many do it?
Game theory might provide some answers.
While most drivers will say that talking on the phone or texting while driving is a dangerous practice, many conclude that their chances of getting in an accident are small. Most drivers know that when they are texting or otherwise engaging in some activity — fiddling with the GPS, entertainment apps or the radio — that takes their attention from the road, that there is a potential risk.
But they calculate that the risk is small, so the momentary diversion is acceptable.
This thinking is flawed because, if for no other reason, the potential harm is so great. In the five or six seconds that a driver takes his or her attention away from the road, a car traveling at 55 mph can cover the length of a football field.
And a lot of bad things can happen in that short time. And the risks are considerable. But also, as Feldman points out in his talks, statistically the odds worsen with each act of distracted driving. On any given occasion, one might not have an accident, but, each time a driver does it, the chances of an accident increase. A University of Utah study concluded that speaking on a cellphone posed the same level of risk as driving while intoxicated.
Sooner or later, it could catch up with you.
Yet, Feldman says, scare stories typically don’t work. A lot of drivers don’t believe them. He points to one study of drivers passing a highway billboard reporting the number of drivers killed in traffic accidents on that stretch of highway. The finding? Accident rates spiked in the one or two miles following the billboard.
Some states have made it illegal to use a handheld cellphone while driving, and there is some research showing the practice declines markedly when law enforcement mounts a high-profile ticketing campaign.
Feldman, though, is not an advocate of the punitive approach and tends more toward consensus building.
Feldman particularly enjoys working with students.
The takeaway from his presentations is that a more effective approach is appealing to a person’s better nature and our innate sense of responsibility for others. Hundreds of years ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed that fundamental to human nature was a recognition of right and wrong, one of his so called categorial imperatives.
We instinctively know whether an action is morally defensible, our gut instinct tells us that; it’s not something we need to be taught.
And this plays out all the time in everyday life. Feldman notes in one presentation that people who put themselves and others at risk by driving distracted would, in an entirely different situation, show great concern for other people.
He uses the example of a person approaching a door carrying a pile of packages. Typically, people nearby would go out of their way to open the door for that person. It is an everyday act of common courtesy, concern and empathy. A basic human instinct, it appears, is to put ourselves in the place of others. True, the harsh demands of living in a competitive society often force that impulse into remission. So, many of those same people, amid the press of daily deadlines and responsibilities, will take a chance and text while driving or fiddle with a music app.
In the face of those pressures, Feldman says, the idea is to reinforce better instincts.
Another powerful motivator is regret, or the potential for it. Feldman has worked with 20 or so drivers who caused fatal or crippling accidents because they were using their cellphones. Courts refer them to Feldman as part of their community service. Some have served jail time. The thing they most regret is having taken another human life. It’s very hard to live with, and Feldman often asks his audiences to imagine that possibility.
“I ask them, what is the worst thing about this,” he said, of the drivers who are sent to him. “They never say the jail sentence. They say it’s ‘knowing what I did to another person, another family.’ As awful as it is to lose a child, I can’t imagine what it is like to be the cause of an accident that killed someone else.”
Feldman knows about risk and how to manage it. He was a competitive skier in high school and still enjoys time on the slopes. Feldman once skied without a helmet, but it was his daughter Casey who urged him to
wear one, observing that if safety was an issue for the children, it should be for adults.
Children might be the key to widespread acceptance of safer, more attentive driving without the distractions of cellphones.
When, during his presentations, Feldman queries parents and children on their reactions to distracted drivers, he is making a point. The more personal response of the children forms the core of a persuasive argument in favor of safer driving practices.
Talking about danger is a statistical abstraction. Talking about the need to treat others with decency and concern is an emotional pitch that resonates with many people. When children describe distracted driving as disrespectful or rude, they are making a point people can relate to.
In this way, Feldman believes that children and young adults hold the potential to becoming a vanguard for the campaign to change driving habits. He encourages students to gently remind parents who yield to the temptation to pick up a cellphone in the car that it makes them feel unsafe.
In keeping with his belief that young drivers will help initiate change, Feldman is partnering with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School researchers to survey high school students nationally.
The idea is to come up with concepts for persuading students to put down the phone while driving. Once the surveys are complete, the plan is to engage a handful of talented student filmmakers across the country to produce public service announcements urging all drivers to keep their focus on the road.
By one measure, Feldman’s campaign still has a long way to go. The annual number of highway fatalities attributable to distracted driving has remained stubbornly within the 3,000 range. The most recent research shows that large numbers of drivers engage in dangerous distracted driving practices, even though they know it raises the risk of an accident.
But there is no doubt that Feldman has put the issue on the national radar and given the issue far more prominence than ever. More people are thinking about the harms of distracted driving and how to change driver habits. Surveys of people who attend his presentations show the presentations caused them to change their attitudes on distracted driving.
He tells the story of a young woman who approached him recently as they were both boarding a plane. She said she had attended one of his presentations at a Philadelphia area high school and thanked him for his work on the subject, and then gave him a hug.
“I feel I have a purpose,” he said. “I am doing something in Casey’s memory, and I think there is some force, whether it is God or something else that pushed me in this direction. At times I think I am the most fortunate person in the world to be able to do this for my daughter.” ⚖
Chris Mondics is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. In earlier assignments, he was the legal affairs writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2007 through 2017 and had been a Washington correspondent for the newspaper for a decade before that. He focuses much of his work on legal and national security issues, as well as politics and the economy.
Photos of Joel and Casey Feldman courtesy of Joel Feldman.
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