Part of the ‘Making it Work’ Series
Your Att Profile of Joel D. Feldman By Chris Mondics
J
oel 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
26 I The Pennsylvania Lawyer
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