Texting and driving costly for teens in many ways

Penalties are tough but message they send is sobering, writes Lorraine Sommerfeld.

A recent survey from Insurance Hotline says too many kids still aren’t putting down their phones when they get behind the wheel, and while Canadians in general are still engaged with their phones at dangerous levels, many teens and their parents aren’t aware of the severity of the impact.

We have a generation coming of age now who have never not had a screen of some sort not only close at hand, but in that hand. What happens when those kids start to drive?

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) tracks Ontario student behaviours in a twice-yearly study, the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS). In 2018,

“33 per cent of students who drive still report that they text and drive, a figure that has not changed since 2015, even though the provincial government strengthened distracted driving laws that year with new penalties for texting and driving.”

And the Insurance Hotline survey shows 14 per cent of Canadians in general admit to texting and driving, making that 33 per cent of Ontarian teens more troublesome. Meanwhile, 41 per cent check their phones at red lights, another stubborn figure that is not going down despite increasingly stricter laws across the country.

Ontario has the strictest distracted driving laws on the books. If your young driver has a G1 or G2 licence and is convicted of distracted driving, for a first conviction, they’ll have a 30-day suspension, a $615 fine and three demerits. Distracted can mean being distracted by eating, drinking, talking to other passengers — almost anything. But increasingly, it’s distraction by electronic communication devices that is pushing charges — and fatalities — higher.

Your teen is probably listed on your insurance as an occasional driver. With that conviction on their record, their portion of your insurance cost will rise — if you’re lucky. There’s a good chance your insurance company will simply tell you they won’t cover a high-risk driver and that conviction puts them in that category. This is a problem that not even money can make go away.

You and your teen would have to sign an excluded driver endorsement, stating they will not drive your car. If they do drive it and get in a collision, most of your coverage goes out the window. The only way around that is to have your own kid charged with theft, according to Anne Marie Thomas of Insurance Hotline.

“You may not be able to make them responsible, but you can hold them accountable,” she says. If you won’t, the law and the insurance industry certainly will.

As the Insurance Hotline report points out, in 2016 (the latest figures available from the National Collision Database), Canada experienced 310 fatalities from distracted driving and over 32,000 injuries. The impact of inconvenience and cost are big, but the more sobering figures are those impacting human life.

It’s important, too, to ferret out the difference between distracted driving tickets, and collisions resulting from that distraction. A recent B.C. case, where a woman was ticketed because her phone was charging in her car’s cupholder, was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, but demonstrates the problem with vaguely written laws. The intention is to encompass rapidly changing technology, but the result can be a haphazard interpretation and application of those laws. Your phone has to be mounted in a proper mount, not lying on the seat. GPS instructions must be pre-entered and on audio, and phone use should be through voice commands.

Everyone needs to stop their use of hand-held devices while they drive, period.