distracted driving Archives - Levinson and Stefani

Should Illinois consider jail time for distracted driving offenders?

We’re taking it to the extreme in the name of safety

On the heels of a May report that Chicago’s distracted driving citations took a dive in 2016, it’s fair to wonder: should Illinois consider stricter penalties for first-time distracted driving offenders?

The basis for my argument is a simple one. If law enforcement can’t reasonably enforce the law, then the law should reasonably enforce itself. In other words, devising harsher, more damning penalties for talking on a cell phone or texting while driving may be the extreme deterrent law enforcement needs to cut down on the rate of distracted driving offenses.

If the matter is purely about making comparisons, then I refer people to this statistic: The Brain Institute of Chicago equates distracted driving as the equivalent of consuming four beers. If you happen to weigh 160 pounds, that’s a 0.080 blood alcohol level content, the threshold by which most states declare someone legally impaired. For first-time offenders, Driving Under the Influence can run in the neighborhood of a $2,500 fine, a suspended license for at least one year, and up to one year in jail time. Second and third-time offenders face even stiffer penalties, going as far as revoking licenses altogether.

There are many people who would have you believe that enforcing such laws is not only impractical but severely lacking enough statistical evidence to prove beneficial. We can look to a 2014 article by U.S. News and Reports, which pointed to 2004 when the NHTSA lowered the minimum BAC threshold in all 50 states from 0.10 to 0.08.

In this case, Gary Biller, president of the National Motorists Association and author of the article, argued that lowering the threshold would do practically nothing to change the drinking habits of Americans. He cited statistics from the NHSTA showing that highway fatalities dropped by 8.6 percent since 2003, but, he argues, the stats didn’t account for advances in auto safety technology like side air bags and better harnesses.

In closing, Biller says this: “The millions of dollars that would be spent in lowering the DUI limit to 0.05 would divert critical resources from that effort. And by arresting tens of thousands of moderate social drinkers every year who have not operated their vehicles unsafely but been deemed legally impaired, we have further burdened our overtaxed legal and correctional systems.”

Biller may have a point to a certain extent, but he also fails to acknowledge what the purpose of enforcing impaired driving is ultimately meant to do, and that’s keeping people safe. It may be impractical for local law enforcement to cite every possible distracted driver, as it is to cite every drunken driver, but it’s certainly better than nothing happening at all.

As we’ve seen in the last two years, the number of auto-related crashes nationwide has jumped by as much as 14 percent. Many attribute that to habits like texting while driving. As Tribune reporter Mary Wisniewski pointed out from her interview on WGN Radio a couple weeks ago, most people believe they can do it safely, and so they do so without thinking about the consequences.

If the penalties were steeper (increasing fines, sending people to jail, etc.), perhaps drivers might think about the consequences more seriously.

As summer arrives, teen drivers require preparation

Tips for keeping your teen safe

With the weather warming and gas prices declining, it seems inevitable that we’re heading towards a summer with hefty consequences.

As the National Safety Council made clear over Memorial Day Weekend, the season of dangerous teen driving behavior is upon us. And now with a new report that gas prices in Illinois are the lowest they’ve been in years, there’s reason to believe the summer of 2017 could potentially turn into one of the deadliest in recent memory.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and it starts by setting examples.

Recently, Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) partnered with Liberty Mutual to look at both teen and adult driving behavior. What they found was disturbing, but not surprising: just as teens are prone to distracted driving behavior, adults engage in distracted driving behaviors more frequently than younger drivers. That’s according to SADD senior advisor Gene Beresin, who told the Tribune that parents are poor role models when it comes to using cellphones while driving.

According to stats compiled by SADD, 55% of surveyed parents admit they use apps while driving, compared to 62% who say they use their cellphone to check incoming calls or talk. One third of teens said they have asked their parents to stop using their phones while driving. Out of 1,000 parents surveyed, 50% admitted texting or calling their teen despite knowing that their son or daughter was on the road and behind the wheel.

Promoting safe driving habits is one thing, but failing to live up to those habits is worse. Take steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Establish parameters for the trip ahead

Any road trip is bound to include music, podcasts, or the radio. The best course of action is to curate your set-list in advance, staving off the temptation to change stations or fiddle with phones mid-drive. Take an opportunity to sit down with your teen and jot down a predetermined set of programming that requires little to no adjustments, at least while driving. Better yet, set your list and immediately toss the phone where it can’t be touched, e.g. the glove box.

Bluetooth is your friend

The beauty of tech is that there’s always something to look forward to. Most cars today are equipped with Bluetooth, allowing drivers to control their device hands-free. This is especially important for anyone using a navigation app to steer their course. Take the opportunity to investigate, install, and setup any navigation or incoming call settings to keep distractions at a minimum.

Incentivize good behavior

Money certainly isn’t the solution to all the world’s problems, but there’s something to be said for incentivizing good behavior. Some people will tell you that’s a bad idea, especially as it pertains to young kids. But once your child enters the teen years, there’s perhaps hope that their behavior won’t be influenced by the thought of receiving a reward. In that sense, consider some small but effective bonus for driving safely. It may require a bit of detective work as far as your teen’s phone is concerned (checking text timestamps and call logs, for example), but it may prove beneficial if it keeps them free of distractions and safe.

At the very least, mount the phone on the dash

Consider this a last resort. A very last resort. One of the things that Beresin pointed out to the Tribune was how challenging it is to suppress the effect of instant gratification. A text or a phone call is, in the minds of many, a gift waiting to be opened. Fighting off that temptation, especially when a parent is not around to supervise, may be too much to overcome for a teenage driver, barring your ability to lock the phone in the glove box and throwing away the key. In that sense, a phone mount for the console dash is, at the very least, a way to keep eyes focused towards the road. Fidgeting with a phone while looking down is never a good idea.

‘Ghostrider’ efforts could prove useful to Chicago police

It works in Michigan. What about here?

Going undercover may be one of the better ways to prevent unnecessary traffic fatalities, if we’re to believe a new program coming out of Michigan.

According to the Wall Street Journal, several police departments In Macomb County and Shelby Township have been conducting covert operations to crack down on distracted driving behavior. Among them is a program called Operation Ghostrider, and it’s paying dividends for cops struggling to clearly identify people breaking the law.

As the Journal reports, officers in Macomb County ride in unmarked cars while others roam busy streets disguised as panhandlers, a subversive but effective way to catch distracted drivers in the act of texting or even applying makeup while driving. Stats compiled by the Journal reveal that the Ghostrider op. is responsible for pulling over 140 drivers and issuing more than 100 citations since the start of the campaign. In two four-hour stretches, Shelby Township Police pulled over 93 drivers, all of which received traffic citations.

It’s not just working in Michigan, either. Another program in Tennessee sees officers ride in large buses, a tactic designed to provide a better vantage point when patrolling traffic. And while the buses are marked, the results have typically been the same.

Chicago might take a lesson from Michigan and Tennessee. It wasn’t long ago that Tribune columnist Mary Wisniewski detailed how distracted driving tickets fell precipitously in 2016, down to a few hundred from tens of thousands just a couple years ago. It seems Chicago’s problems stem from less manpower and more bureaucratic red tape.

Those are just two problems. But we’ll have bigger problems if we continue to ignore a deadly trend.

Over the last two years the country has seen a surge in motor-vehicle related fatalities, up six percent in 2015 and up 14 percent compared to 2014. Nearly every expert agrees: distracted driving is one, if not the, primary culprit.

There are differences between rural townships in Michigan and a city like Chicago. But whatever the differences, we can all agree that more needs to be done locally to prevent the city’s downward trend from spiraling further out of control. It doesn’t hurt to look at examples of things that’s proved successful elsewhere.

Distracted driving tickets took a dive in 2016

From tens of thousands to hundreds

Distracted driving remains a low priority for the Chicago Police Department, a consequence of less manpower and changes to city ordinances, according to Tribune Transportation Columnist Mary Wisniewski.

Wisniewski made appearances on WGN Radio and WBEZ this morning to discuss the huge drop off in the number of citations being doled out by the CPD for things like texting while driving. In 2015, nearly 26,000 distracted driving tickets were written, compared to 46,000 in 2014. In 2016, the CPD wrote just 186 tickets.

“They’ve all but given up on enforcing this particular city ordinance,” Wisniewski said on WGN’s The John Williams Show, prompting host John Williams to ask why. Wisniewski explained:

In 2015, there was a change in the law that made police treat citations under the cell phone ordinance the same as other moving violations, which means that [officers] now have to go to traffic court and appear when the person who’s going up there with their ticket is appearing. [Officers] used to be able to not appear and the tickets could be upheld without them.

Wisniewski also pointed out that the CPD now employs fewer officers and that the department is placing stronger emphasis on other areas of law enforcement, like guns and gang violence. Still, she continued, the CPD hopes to make distracted driving a priority in the future.

The U.S. has experienced an influx of crashes over the last two years, including a 14 percent jump in auto-related fatalities nationally—the highest in almost half a century. Officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attribute at least some of that to distracted driving.

The people who are experts on this said that people are very complacent about distracted driving. Everyone thinks they can do it safely. Everyone thinks, ‘well, I made it home okay, I must be a great driver.’

One of the ways that we can change that is through technology. One of things I brought up in my article is a technology that a company’s working on called a textalizer, which will be able to look at your phone’s operating system after you’ve been in a crash. You’ll be able to plug in your phone and see if you were just texting or on the phone.

Williams countered by saying that while a textalizer might be a good thing, it still wouldn’t prevent people from doing something bad in the first place, would it?

Do we need stronger penalties?

As we’ve outlined here on the blog, and as Wisniewski illustrated to Williams, the key to prevent distracted driving may be imposing stricter penalties to deter people from doing it at all.

Driving Under the Influence is considered a class A misdemeanor in Illinois for first and second-time offenders. Some instances qualify as a felony, which carries much stiffer penalties, including hefty fines and extended jail time.

Organizations like the Brain Injury Society go as far as to say that texting while driving is the equivalent of drinking four beers, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has said that the two are similar as far as the level of distraction. As it stands, Chicago and other cities and states could benefit by qualifying the word “impairment” to cover a much broader scope of infractions. One hopes that doing so would effectively scare people straight.

Local drivers spend five percent of driving time using their phones each day

It’s probably no surprise that despite horrific tales of distracted driving, Illinois continues to figure prominently on the graph of unflattering statistics.

A new study conducted by Zendrive discovered that among 3.1 million drivers and over 5.6 billion miles of driving, nearly 88 percent of those trips included at least some use of a smartphone. When extrapolated for the entire driving population of the U.S., that equals out to roughly 600 million distracted trips per day, and on average, phone use was 3.5-minutes per hour of driving.

Placing firmly on the list of offending states is Illinois, whose drivers spend more than 5 percent of driving time on the phone. That’s just below the 7.5 percent high, which belongs to Vermont. But surprisingly, Illinois is one of six states among the top 25 that enforces a ban on cell use while driving, making it one of the few in which the law doesn’t appear to discourage people from doing so. At the local level, Chicago is one of two major cities that ban cell use while driving, yet the city places in the top five of municipalities with the “most distracted” drivers.

That’s in stark contrast with six of the top ten states where people spend the least percentage of time on their phones, including Oregon and California, all of which have also passed laws imposing restrictions on phone use while driving.

Other notable stats and context from Zendrive:

Taking your eyes off the road for two seconds increases your chance of collision 20-fold

At 55 mph, two seconds is enough time to travel the length of two basketball courts

Drivers’ phone use is extremely difficult for crash investigators and traffic safety experts to measure

In 2015, 91percent of Americans owned mobile phones and drove over 3 trillion miles

In 2015, 35,092 people died in traffic, and NHTSA reported just 476 mobile phone related deaths

After a steady 40 year decline, U.S. traffic deaths shot up in 2015 and 2016, exceeding 40,000 for the first time in a decade