Program opens eyes to danger of texting, driving
Gilbert teen Lexington Dath drove a car through a course marked with tiny cones. A driving instructor sat beside him, and another student was in the backseat.
The first trip through the course seemed easy enough. But the next time around, the instructor changed the rules.
She told Dath to pull out his phone and send a text, and wasn’t there a radio station he said he wanted to listen to?
Dath attempted to drive through the same course once again, this time fiddling with the radio and texting.
Dath drove over several cones.
“We just hit another pedestrian,” the instructor said. “Oh, and we’re going off the course.”
Dath hit several more cones before finishing the course.
“My text good,” he said.
“But you killed 20 people at this point,” the instructor replied.
Dath was among East Valley Institute of Technology high-school students who attended the Ford Driving Skills for Life program on Nov. 7 at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park on the Gila River Reservation. The program was free for schools and the general public.
Ford Driving Skills for Life started in 2003 to educate teens about safe driving, said James Graham, community-relations manager with the Ford Motor Co. Fund in Michigan. Today, the program reaches as far as Saudi Arabia, Graham
is
pretty said.
Vehicle crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among teenagers, said Ahwatukee Foothills resident Randy Bleicher, lead instructor with Driving Skills for Life.
The program addresses two main areas: inexperience and distraction, Bleicher said. Students learn evasive maneuvers and how to handle various situations by driving cars with instructors and fellow students as passengers. It also focuses on the decision-making process while driving.
Mesa resident and East Valley Institute of Technology student Chris Roth, 17, was in the car with Dath and had his own shot at driving.
“I’m scared people actually do this stuff in the real world,” Roth said. “I just think about all the cones I hit. I don’t want to be in that situation.”
In a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report released in April, 15- to 19-yearolds were listed as the largest group of distracted drivers in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics are available. Cellphones distracted roughly one-fifth of those drivers at the time of a crash.
In Arizona in 2012, more than 11,000 crashes, or nearly 6 percent of all crashes, were caused by inattention or distracted driving, according to Arizona Department of Transportation crash facts released in May.
Numbers could be misleading, however, because distracted driving is difficult to cite or prosecute, in turn making it difficult to track, said Alberto Gutier, director of the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
There is no state law against using a cellphone while driving, Gutier said, but Phoenix and Tucson have city bans against texting and driving.
However, if a driver is not staying in a lane, jerking the car or driving on the shoulder while using a cellphone, police can issue citations for not driving reasonably and prudently, Gutier said.
Gutier said that when a driver is texting or distracted, there is a corresponding decline in awareness of what is happening around the car.
“You forgot the most important thing: safe driving,” Gutier said.
The U.S. Department of Transportation identifies three types of distracted driving: cognitive, when the driver is not focused on driving; visual, when the driver does not look at the road; and manual, when the driver does not have hands on the steering wheel.
Texting encompasses all three. A driver thinking about texting has his or her eyes and hands on the phone.
Distracted driving does not mean only texting. It can be anything that draws the driver’s attention from the road, said Lindsay Colcombe, program manager of the National Organizations for Youth Safety, a Virginia-based group that educates teenagers about the dangers of distracted driving.
“The most important thing to remember when talking about distracted driving is that it’s preventable,” Colcombe said.
Traditionally, distracted driving involved such things as eating, changing CDs or talking to a passenger, Colcombe said. But as technology improved, drivers became additionally distracted by phones and GPS.
“Because we have all these different types of distractions in the car, people are driving more distracted than they use to,” Colcombe said.
This additional avenue for distracted driving led electrical engineer Timothy Schultz and his company, Telurex SSA in Chandler, to create Zero, a technology that prevents two-way communication in phones while a car is moving, except in cases of emergency calls.
A device wired into the fuse panel under the hood of the car blocks calls, texting, e-mail, the Internet and social media on a phone when the car is moving faster 3 mph, Schultz said.
About two years ago, Schultz had a conversation with a mother who lost a child in a distracteddriving crash.
“It bothered me. I think of that lady every day. I have three children of my own,” Schultz said.
Schultz left his electrical engineering career of 20 years to create technology that would help
than prevent distracted driving.
Schultz said that as cellphones become even more prevalent and can do more, drivers will become even more distracted. He said he expects the number of accidents to increase.
“I think if people really saw the numbers, it would be scary. It’s really scary for me,” Schultz said.