DRIVERLESS CARS MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN GUN CONTROL

There is an urgency for driverless cars because people should not be allowed to drive them anymore. They should not be allowed to put their feet on the accelerator or their hands on the steering wheel.

I say this as a person who loves to drive, but I am looking at my wife in the ICU of a New Jersey hospital. Her face is swollen and purple except in the spots where it’s scarlet from deep abrasions.

Tubes fill her mouth and a neck collar and plastic brace hold her face in place because her jaw is broken in two places and her right cheekbone is pushed in. Her pelvis is fractured, several internal organs are bruised and and her body is gouged with deep abrasions.

My wife was broadsided by an SUV yesterday while she was on one of her early morning 25 mile bike rides. I will spare you the description of what her fellow rider saw. I just see the damage that was done to that slight body and to our family. No one who saw her in the trauma center in those first hours could not help but cry. In the early hours of the crisis I called my son at college to let him know his mother had been badly hurt. At the time, we didn’t know the extent of her injuries. I guess he just couldn’t fathom the worst for his mother.

“Well, she’ll be all right, won’t she?” he asked calmly. My answer — “I don’t know” — came out as a sob.

In 2015, 38,300 people died in car crashes and 4.4 million others were injured, according to the National Safety Council. That is more than twice as many people who are killed by guns in this country every year. There is an argument for people not having guns, but there may be an even bigger argument for driverless cars.

The first truly driverless cars aren’t expected to hit the road until somewhere between 2020 and 2025. As an indication of when they will be in wide use, Uber has said it doesn’t expect its fleet to be filled with these vehicles until 2030. According to current rates, that means a couple hundred thousand more deaths from cars, and an unfathomable number of people injured like my wife.

I don’t yet know exactly what happened when my wife was hit, but I know that it happened as she crossed on a road with two lanes in each direction, punctuated by red lights. Cars reach speeds of 50 mph, and when you’re going that fast, some drivers — like me — don’t want to slow down. Those lights are reasons to accelerate.

A driverless car wouldn’t have that impatience or thrill of speed. It wouldn’t be distracted for a few seconds by something on the side of the road, changing the radio station, a few cans of beer, road rage or a daydreamy thought.

When we left the hospital late that first night, the car with my daughter and my wife’s sister inside, was quiet. We were comforted to know that her injuries were all fixable and healable, although they were going to be really painful and would take months of rehab. And we were emotionally spent.

As I drove, my mind kept drifting back to my wife’s bruised face and I felt my daughter’s hand touch my arm.

“What?” I asked.

“Slow down,” she said.