When driving around metro Atlanta roads, I’m sure that you, like me, still see a large number of people texting while driving even though it is no longer legal to do so. What you might not have noticed though, is that teen drivers are less and less likely to be the ones texting.
According to a newly released study, teen drivers have taken to heart the increased emphasis on the dangers of texting and talking on your phone while driving.
“I think that the US DOT has been a leader in messaging the safety consequences of texting or talking on your cell phone,” David Hurwitz Associate Professor of Transportation and Engineering at Oregon State University said.
The research was a part of the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium consisting of educators and transportation professionals from five universities: Oregon State University, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, University of Idaho, University of Washington, and Washington State University.
Unfortunately the study found that while cell phone use of teens behind the wheel is down, other forms of distracted driving are still prevalent.
“(Texting and talking) is one subset of these challenges,” Hurwitz said. “Every time we make a choice to do something other than drive our vehicle, we are potentially impacting our performance and that is something that needs to be talked about more.”
Of the 4,000 teens surveyed in the study, many admitted to other forms of distracted driving including day dreaming, applying makeup, searching through a bag or purse, using hand-held navigation systems, doing homework and even changing clothes.
Hurwtiz told me that the aim of the study was to improve awareness of teen drivers with the negative impact of distracted driving. Most importantly was to relay what constitutes distracted driving and the impact of those distractions.
While teens have, forgive me, “gotten the message” about texting, they really haven’t been educated about other forms of distracted driving.
“We found reasonably high rates of perceptions in teenagers that texting is a distraction while driving,” Hurwitz said.
It is the other distractions that need to be improved on.
“Eating, drinking, adjusting the radio, playing with the console, navigation or talking with passengers [are just as distracting],” Hurwitz said. “There are dozens and dozens of possible distractions.”
With a majority of safe driving messages geared toward talking and texting on cell phones, it was apparent to the researchers that younger drivers need more education on other ways we can get distracted behind the wheel.
“It comes down to correctly perceiving the risks while driving,” Hurwitz said. “These results show that we are aware of the impact of mobile devices on distracted driving, but we are not as aware of all the other types of distraction.”
While the study was aimed at younger drivers, I think we can all take something away from the research. Just because we aren’t talking our texting on our phones, it doesn’t mean that we are not doing other things to distract from our driving.
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