Why distracted driving is becoming a fatal problem

A young woman ran a red traffic light while talking on a cellphone. She slammed into another vehicle crossing directly in front of her. The vehicle she hit was not the first car through the intersection, it was the third or fourth.

The police investigation determined the 20-year-old driver never touched her brakes and was travelling 77km/h when she hit the other vehicle. The crash cost a 12-year-old boy his life.

Witnesses told investigators the driver was not looking down, dialing on the phone, or texting. She was looking straight ahead talking on her cellphone as she sped past four cars and a school bus stopped at the traffic lights next to her.

Researchers have called this crash a classic case of inattention blindness (distracted driving) caused by the cognitive distraction of a cellphone conversation.

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The greatest issue with mobile phone use while driving is the lack of capacity of the human brain to react to external stimuli, assimilate information and decide on appropriate action while concentrating on something else.

Estimates indicate drivers using cellphones look but fail to see up to 50% of the information in their driving environment.

What this means in effect is that while we are talking/texting on the phone, vital road information is not being processed by the brain, resulting in decisions being made with incomplete information - quite often with disastrous consequences.

Studies have shown that drivers talking on cellphones are four times more likely to be involved in a crash than drivers who are not.

When one considers that one million crashes were reported last year to the SA police involving almost 1.8 million vehicles, why would you want to increase your already high crash risk?

"We know South African roads are dangerous. On average 40 people die and 25 are permanently disabled on our roads daily," says the AA's head of public affairs, Gary Ronald.

"The goals of the 'Decade of Action' are to reduce crashes, injury and death by 50% by 2020. Their motto is '10 reasons plus 10 years is a decade of action'."

The "Decade of Action for Road Safety" was launched by the UN with the aim of stabilising and then reducing global road deaths by 2020.

Major economies of the G20, leading developing countries and public institutions like the World Bank and the World Health Organisation have all endorsed the campaign.

The decade of action was first proposed by the "Make Roads Safe" campaign. More than a million people have supported this call for UN action. Now, with political will and increased resources, millions of lives could be saved.

10 reasons to support Decade of Action:

• A total of 1.3 million people are killed on the world's roads each year.
• Road crashes kill more people than malaria does.
• Fifty million people are injured, many disabled as a result.
• Ninety percent of these casualties occur in developing countries.
• Annual deaths are forecast to rise to 1.9 million by 2020.
• It is the No1 cause of death among young people worldwide.
• By 2015, it will be the leading health burden for children over the age of five in developing countries.
• The economic cost to developing countries is at least $100-billion a year.
• Injuries place immense burdens on hospitals and health systems.

The causes for these crashes are varied, though there is little statistical data pointing to distracted driving as a significant cause of crashes in South Africa. International experience and research is, however, showing a disturbing correlation between distracted driving and injury.

• The research and numbers show that our cars need to be a cell-free zone.