Focus on Distraction

How do you stop distracted driving in a culture of distraction?

The omnipresence of social networking and mobile technologies has changed consumers’ expectations about service delivery and personal communications. People want things immediately, and mobile technology makes it possible to communicate these desires instantaneously.

Our fascination with the relatively new portability of our conversations has been to the detriment of many things that demand our focus elsewhere — driving being one of them.

For people who speak fluent statistics, property and casualty insurers have a wealth of numbers indicating that mobile devices and driving don’t mix.

Manitoba’s public auto insurer, Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI), notes the province’s police have already issued 500 tickets related to driving while using a cell phone thus far in 2012.

In Saskatchewan, during a two-day blitz in November 2011, Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI), the province’s public insurer, noted police handed out 207 tickets specifically for cell phone use in the car.

Quebec’s police force issued 9,000 tickets in 2011 for driving while using a cell phone, up from 7,000 in 2010.

This is just a sampling of the numbers. I could go on and on.

Of course, cell phones are not the only things that distract us while driving. Eating, talking on hands-free devices, getting pets to sit still, getting your kids to stop beating each other up in the back seat, applying make-up, setting your GPS, fiddling with the CD player, consulting maps and yes, even reading the newspaper, all qualify.

Many in the insurance and traffic safety research communities believe cell phones and movile devices have unjustly hi-jacked the issue of distracted driving.

But from the politicians’ perspective, compared to legislating against car radios, GPS devices, passengers, lipstick, small children, pets and reading materials in the car, targeting mobile devices appears to be something that might be at least remotely enforceable.

And yet, restricting the use of mobile devices in the car is proving to be tricky enough. The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) presented a most telling stat in 2007, when it commissioned a poll on cell phone use and driving. The poll showed that even though 89% of 1,200 Canadians surveyed said they were concerned about driver distractions, 60% of drivers surveyed said they would not stop using their cell phones when driving.

In other words, my own cell phone use is not the problem. It’s the other person’s cell phone use that is endangering me.

As long as this is our core approach to the issue, people will not stop using their own cell phones while they drive. Somehow, we need to get across the idea that drivers are responsible for their own actions in the car. Distracted driving will not go away if we simply blame others for failing to do what we are incapable of doing ourselves. That is, turning off our mobile devices for the duration of a road trip.

Toronto hosted the Driven to Distraction conference organized by the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) and the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) in March 2012. Several delegates there observed the insurance industry still has a long way to go before succeeding in changing the public’s driving behaviours. One noted it took about 20 years for the public to fully comprehend the safety benefits of seat belts.

One can expect a similar lengthy road to convince people to hang up on their social lives for the time it takes for them to stop the car. In a culture of distraction, it’s not easy to get people to focus on something other than their mobile devices.

Expect this to be more of a campaign than a single battle.