What’s Worse Than a Minivan Driver?

A minivan driver in the fast lane, typing on his blackberry.

Minivans and their drivers are a pain on the roadways. You can’t see through or around the vehicles to get a good idea what is on the road ahead of you. And the drivers are usually slow and distracted because, by definition, they usually have kids in the minivan with them.

But to make the situation dangerous, an idiot minivan driver could not put down his blackberry long enough to commute safely and ended up plowing into the rear of another vehicle which was transporting a 5 month old baby. Fortunately there were no major injuries. From the Seattle Times here:

A Mercer Island man fiddling with his BlackBerry was cruising down Interstate 5’s express lanes Tuesday morning in his minivan, oblivious that traffic ahead had come to a dead stop.

The 53-year-old man’s minivan smashed into a car, setting off a chain reaction that included three other cars and a Community Transit bus, which was carrying 28 passengers.

The driver of the first car rear-ended by the minivan was a 36-year-old Lake Forest Park woman whose 5-month-old son was in a car seat in the back seat.

Although the accident Tuesday morning caused no serious injuries, it disrupted southbound express-lane traffic heading into downtown Seattle for at least an hour.

The driver, who told troopers he’d been using his BlackBerry, was cited for following too closely, a $153 fine. His name was unavailable Tuesday.

I have seen the appalling behavior of Blackberry users reading and responding to emails while they are trying to drive around the DC area here. They are more menacing than cell phone yackers.