Pa. citations for distracted driving climb; most go to men
Beware the driver with the cell phone in his hand.
Of all the citations for being distracted by one’s cell phone issued in Pennsylvania last year, a full 70 percent went to men, according to data compiled by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
The number of citations has risen every year since 2012, when Pennsylvania’s anti-texting law went into effect, and Allegheny County is now the second-worst in the state.
Under Pennsylvania law, it’s legal for non-commercial drivers to talk on a cell phone while driving, but it’s illegal to text or wear earphones. Commercial drivers can’t talk or text. The agency tallied the citations for both types of drivers.
“If you’re traveling 65 mph on
the highway, and you look down for three seconds to check your phone, you’ve gone the length of a football field blindfolded,” said Cpl. Adam Reed with the Pennsylvania State Police.
The consequences can be fatal.
“Monday will be six years that my son was killed,” said Michelle Johnson of Marshall. “Every holiday there's an empty chair at the table.”
Ms. Johnson created a foundation in memory of her son, Connor, who was killed by a distracted driver; she urges people to pay attention behind the wheel. Her motto: “Drive without distractions; live without regrets.”
Nationally, distracted driving killed 3,477 people in 2015, the last year for which there’s data, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It was the fastest-growing cause of highway fatalities, over drunk driving, speeding and failing to wear a seat belt.
The Pennsylvania citation statistics were not correlated directly with highway accidents or fatalities, but cell phone use and texting are two of the most common driver distractions, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association in Washington, D.C. The association urges drivers not to use cell phones at all while driving, regardless of current state law.
“A potentially deadly machine — that’s what a car is,” said Kara Masek at the Governors Highway Safety Association. “Compare it to a loaded gun: You have to use it responsibly... Our best advice is really to focus on driving.”
According to PennDOT, there were 1,017 crashes in Pennsylvania in 2015 in which the driver was using a hand-held phone; seven people died, and 566 were injured. Those statistics aren’t specific to texting.
In 2016, Allegheny County drivers were the secondworst in the state, with 316 citations — behind only Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia, which had 379, according to the AOPC report. And things are not improving: The number of citations for texting while driving jumped in Allegheny County by 59 percent over 2015.
Allegheny County also rose in the rankings; previously, it had been the thirdworst in the state — but Philadelphia issued 19 percent fewer citations for texting and wearing headphones than it did in 2015.
The increase in texting while driving in Allegheny County is made stark by the fact it’s dropping in most of the surrounding counties. The number of citations dropped from 11 to seven in Armstrong County, from 22 to 12 in Beaver, from 59 to 58 in Washington County and from 75 to 71 in Westmoreland County. In Butler County the number of citations rose only slightly, from 43 to 45.
The male-female ratio in Allegheny was slightly lower than the statewide average with 63 percent of the citations going to men and 34 percent going to women.
In only three counties did women get more citations than men: Elk, Potter and Venango.