Sharing the road with impaired drivers in old-time, and modern Phoenix


I've lived in Arizona for a long time, and I've shared the road with impaired drivers. You have too, and it's been that way for a very long time. Not only in Phoenix, of course, but that's what I'm thinking of today.
And I know what you're thinking when I say "impaired" - drunk. And that's true, but it's just part of the types of impairment that I've seen on the road in Phoenix, and I can name a few, and make educated guesses about what types of impairment was popular in Phoenix before I got there.

Yes, of course, there's alcohol. Back in 1977, when I first came to Phoenix, drunk driving was just beginning to be considered something that wasn't just laughed off. When I learned to drive in Minneapolis, in the mid-1970s, most of the people I knew just considered it a risk of being out on the road. If you got hit by a drunk driver, it was just bad luck, they said. I had no interest in getting hit by a drunk driver, or being a drunk driver, so I always separated my drinking from my driving. I'm no angel, but I always was happy to hand over my car keys. I had seen the movies they showed us in driver's ed class!

But while my driving has always been sober, I've always had a very serious impairment - I daydream. I've known some really great drivers and their concentration is always fierce. They're always looking at the road, and they're always thinking about their driving. My mind drifts, and I have always tended to be a sight-seer. A dreamy sight-seeing person like me has no business behind the wheel, it's a serious impairment. By the way, I hung up my car keys about three years ago. I've done my part to make Phoenix streets safer!

Another severe impairment that I've seen is Driving Under the Influence of Kids. I live near a couple of Elementary Schools and my heart goes out to the sleepy parents rushing to get their kids to school so they can rush to get to work on time. I give these vehicles plenty of leeway. I've never had to deal with kids in my car, but I used to be a kid, and my brothers and I were just a bunch of noisy animals. It must have been awful for our parents!

Going back to old-time Phoenix, I have to wonder how much impairment there was because of all of the new drivers. That is, when cars were new to Phoenix streets, and most people really had no idea what to do. The old rules of horse-drawn vehicles couldn't apply to something that went that fast. Horses trot along at about 5 miles per hour, the cars were going twice that, if not more. And of course cars required more from the driver than a buckboard - you had to look yourself, you didn't have a horse looking at the road. If a road dead-ended, a horse would stop.

I'm a little too young to do more than imagine the difficulty of driving cars with standard transmissions along with smoking. I'm not sure when automatic lighters started being put in cars, but it had to be quite a juggling act to light a cigarette and shift a car. There was a time when most people smoked, and most cars didn't have automatic transmissions. And even if you could light your cigarette, or cigar, with a match while driving and shifting, you had to see through the smoke that was right in front of you, obscuring your vision.

What can I say? Let's be careful out there!

Image at the top of this post: Looking west on Adams from Central Avenue in 1930, Phoenix, Arizona.
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