Time was, youngsters, when not every road vehicle came equipped with turn signals.

Older people will recall those days, say 60 or 70 years ago, when drivers stuck their arms out the window to let other motorists know they intended to go left or right, slow down or stop.

An arm straight out meant left turn, bent at the elbow with the hand up specified right, bent at elbow with hand down meant slowing or stopping.

Signaling required that one hand leave the steering wheel for a few seconds, not exactly the safest way to handle a multi-ton piece of machinery. So signal mechanisms were put on the list of instruments cars had to have to lessen the dangers of driving.

In the category of good intentions with disappointing results, blinkers make the high mark. Because few drivers use them, the measure of safety they are supposed to add vanishes. Even with laws that say they have to, motorists don’t, and police officers, who themselves are sometimes guilty of the violation, seem to consider blinker-avoidance a minor problem, not on the scale of drunken driving or speeding.

Maybe it is, though in searching the Web, there are statistics and studies about non-use of signals causing accidents, usually in conjunction with other risky driving behavior.

But not clicking on the blinker reflects a certain disregard, if not disdain, of others, much like using a cellphone inappropriately.

I wonder if cellphone inventors envisioned a day when humans would be hard-pressed to detach themselves from the darn things. Admittedly, cellphones are very useful, but they have become clutching, distracting appendages.

I often have to call out “heads up” before dodging a dopey smartphone abuser about to walk into me because he/she can’t pull his/her face from a flickering touch screen long enough to observe the surroundings.

It’s too bad that on a crisp winter afternoon on Waimanalo Beach, when soft trades ruffled the blue-blue ocean, two young women never once lifted their heads from their phones in the hour that we shared the sand. A crystalline sky and kiss of the breeze were no match for the cells they had made for themselves with their phones.

No wonder, then, that driving safety experts advocate a complete ban on cellphones for motorists. Keying a cellphone, not to mention texting, takes digits from the task of driving, just as hand-signaling did. More critically, it draws away the brain.

There may come a time when the novelty of e-devices wears off and people will use them not simply because they can, but because they are helpful. As well, the physical disconnection, the spiritual indifference to others that has emerged as a side effect, might be replaced with the ability to be mindful of each other. People might even begin clicking the blinker again.

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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.