Distracted Driving Epidemic

I couldn’t attend the Distracted Driving Summit but watched some of the webcast today. Tons of useful statistics and opinions from researchers and industry experts. Jim Lehrer at PBS covered the story and reported that distracted driving is “at epidemic proportions” in America in an interview with Ray LaHood, U.S. Transportation Secretary.

Changing personal behavior is difficult but I believe that there will be some actions from this summit that might help. Making distracted driving into something that is unacceptable socially seems to be one of the pillars of the solution. Another complimentary approach is to provide certain segments of the driving population with a technology that could be used to detect distracted driving.

Monitoring for Driving While Texting (DWT) and Driving While Distracted (DWD) incidents could have a serious impact in the following two segments of the driving public:

1) Teens. Parents and others monitor distracted driving to make sure it is not reaching dangerous levels.

2) Business fleets. Companies have liability risks and considerable costs involved in accidents. They have financial incentive to monitor fleet drivers to enforce policies.

Just by starting there, we could address over 10% of the cars on the road. And a crucial 10% at that…the crash rate for teens is nearly 4 times that of drivers 20 and older according to an article from Edmunds. Businesses should be motivated too – the average cost per injury accident is $128,000 according to an article from Cindy Brauer at www.automotive-fleet.com.

I’m looking forward to the follow-on to this summit where solutions are discussed as much as the problem.