Every person who crosses a street in this city knows that the BMW bearing down on them is really a mobile telephone booth with a licence to kill. Everyone knows that, if it’s a choice between keeping one eye on the road and one out for pedestrians, or hitting the speed–dial to negotiate the finer points of the divorce settlement at 140 kilometres an hour, the cellphone is going to win every time.

It’s helpful to think of the great highways leading into this city, the 401 and the Don Valley, as essentially a giant switchboard on radial tires, and of the people behind the wheel on these highways as so preoccupied absorbing information from their stockbrokers, their mistresses, or their nannies, as to have no time at all to acknowledge the information that they’ve just cut off an eighteen–wheeler transport truck, and are about to vacuum up some poor Ford Taurus under the bonnet of their chattering SUV. “Reach Out and Touch Someone” is such a vivid little slogan.

Some people say cellphones are as bad as alcohol. I think this is a slander on booze. Alcohol is something which, when added to the human mind, makes it lazy, and careless, and stupid. Cellphones in cars gravitate to those minds that are that way already.