“It is exactly the same if not worse,” says Glenda Guindon, president of Holway & Hutchinson Insurance in Kingston, Ont. “It is causing a lot of accidents and we are seeing a lot of those tickets, almost every one of them are new drivers that have a texting and driving or cellphone driving charge.”
The results of a study commissioned by Ford Motor Co., of Canada late last year show 93 per cent of teens admitted to distracted driving; 72 per cent admitted to using hand-held technology, such as texting, while behind the wheel and 37 per cent admitted to e-mailing while their vehicle was in motion.
The prevalence of texting and driving – especially among teenage drivers – is a perception of it not being as dangerous or socially unacceptable as drinking and driving.
“They are thinking it is not illegal, because it is not alcohol,” Guindon told Insurance Business. “They feel they have such good control over it, they can do two things at the same time. They’ve been doing it their whole life; if you’ve sat across from a teenager and had a conversation, their head is down texting the whole time.”
It is a problem that will have to be tackled in the same way impaired driving was back in the 1980s through a public campaign like that launched by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Guindon points out.
“It is going to have to start at the very, very beginning,” she says, “and just like the MADD get the people involved.”
The Ford study also found that teen drivers are apt to engage in riskier behaviour as they age – 16 or 17-year-old respondents said they were more likely to follow the rules of the road (71 per cent) than their 18 and 19-year-old counterparts (48 per cent).
“A phone call or text can wait for you to reach your destination or find a safe place to pull over,” says Suzanne Anton, B.C.’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice. “It is simply not worth the risk of causing a crash and causing serious injury or worse to yourself or someone else on the road. Police across B.C. are doing their part to change this dangerous behaviour by ticketing drivers and enforcing the law. That means if you’re caught talking or texting on your cell while driving, you could face a $167 fine and three penalty points.”
The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia says that drivers are four times more likely to crash when talking on a handheld phone and 23 times more likely to get in a crash if they text behind the wheel. The organization says that texting behind the wheel takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, and at 50 km per hour, that is equivalent to driving 64 meters blind – more than the length of a professional-size hockey rink.
"Every day police across the province encounter drivers using hand-held devices behind the wheel and based on their excuses, they just don’t get it,” says Chief Officer Neil Dubord, chair of the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police Traffic Safety Committee. “Most drivers acknowledge that distracted driving is dangerous but they’re also quick to justify their own behaviours. We need drivers to realize there are no excuses for putting others at risk.”
Convictions for distracted driving for texting last year were:
B.C.: 48,000
Alta: 27,112
Sask: 4,300
Man.: 2,875
Ont.: 63,813
Que.: 47,000
N.B.: 1,389
P.E.I.: 257
N.S.: 4,841
N.L.: 1,018
Yukon: 84
N.W.T.: 183
Nunavut has no distracted driving legislation that includes texting.
Academics who study the issue say texting is the most deadly of distractions – drivers who read or write text messages while operating vehicles are 23 times more likely to be in a crash than non-distracted drivers, according to researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI).
In the U.S., texting while driving annually causes 1.6 million accidents (National Safety Council) and 330,000 injuries (Harvard Center for Risk Analysis). Stunningly, 11 teens die every day while texting in the car, according to the Institute for Highway Safety.
“Dialling or texting or reading a text message, that’s when they get themselves into trouble,” said Charlie Klauer, a research scientist at VTII who specializes in watching people drive. Her studies involve monitoring drivers for months at a time via cameras and other equipment installed in their vehicles. “We don’t see any increase [in crash risk] at all when we see adult or novice drivers talking on a cellphone, regardless of whether they’re holding it or hands-free,” she said. “That’s because when you’re talking on a cellphone, you’re still looking forward.”
Teens, according to Klauer’s latest research, are particularly prone to distracted behaviour in the months after being licensed. Her data, published in January in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that while novice drivers engage in distracted behaviour less frequently than experienced drivers in the first six months of their driving careers, their willingness to text or take part in other risky distractions doubles that of experienced drivers by the time they’ve been on the road for a year and a half.
As smartphones become more ubiquitous, Klauer said, VTTI forecasts that related fatalities will climb.
“You can Skype with them, teens are doing Instagram and Snapchat while driving. I do think we’re going to see more and more distraction crashes because of the smartphones,” she says, adding: “We need to be very vigilant in educating both teens and parents that these types of activities are very dangerous for teen drivers and they should avoid them at all costs.”
