You’re driving down the highway, when the cellphone sitting in the passenger seat beside you beeps. You have a text. You try to keep your eyes on the road, but checking your phone messages is such a compelling, ingrained habit that you reach for it and give the screen a quick glance.
If you fix your gaze on the phone for five seconds, in that time you will have driven the length of a Canadian football field.
“And you’ve driven that distance blindly,” says Karen Dietrich, Executive Director of SADD — the Society Against Distracted Drivers, a local non-profit formed late last year in Cranbrook in response to the rising incidents and devastating consequences of distracted driving.
As April is Distracted Driving Month, it’s a good occasion for SADD’s message to be heard loud and clear.
Brian Kostiuk, one of the founding members of SADD, has had first-hand experience of the dangers of distracted driving, recalling several incidents — including a “football field” incident near Fort Steele, where a car operated by a driver on a cellphone crossed the centre line into the oncoming lane — right into Kostiuk’s path. A high-speed collision was narrowly averted, but Kostiuk found the incident traumatic enough that, on top of the other close calls he’s had, he was compelled to take action by helping launch SADD last fall.
“You’re drained by an experience like that,” he said. “You just missed serious injury, or being killed.
The statistics are indeed shocking: 25 per cent of accidents resulting in death or serious injury in British Columbia are caused by distracting driving, Dietrich said. “That’s higher than impaired, and second only to speeding.”
According to 2016 figures, distracted driving results in an average of 78 deaths annually, compared to 48 deaths resulting from impaired driving.
“These deaths and serious injuries are needless,” Dietrich said. “They ruin families, financially and emotionally. They put a drain on our health system.”
While raising awareness of the issue among the general populace and keeping it at the forefront of drivers’ minds is SADD’s focus, one of the society’s main goals is education, particularly targeting youth — young people who are at the beginning of their driving lives, but at the same time have grown up with devices, small screens and texting.
“We want to get them while they’re young,” Dietrich said. “The 15-, 16-year-olds. Before these new drivers have developed those bad habits.”
In this regard, SADD would love to fill the void left by the now-defunct PARTY program (Prevent Alcohol Related Trauma In Youth), which for years educated local students about the dangers and affects of impaired driving. The society is currently seeking to get a similar, distracted-driving related program set up.
Kostiuk added that another thing SADD is trying to get across is more education and awareness-raising from ICBC itself, about insurance rates, so that drivers are aware of the penalties and and the potential.
“When they sell us insurance, they have an obligation to inform us of the fines, the statistics and the consequences, especially for young people,” he said.
Kostiuk said the local RCMP have added two new designated traffic control officers, who are focussing this April — Distracted Driving Month — on cellphones and other devices behind the wheel.
But even though SADD is seeing such progress on the awareness front, Distracted Driving Month has still been less than satisfying for the Society. Kostiuk said there have been no public campaigns on the issue, by ICBC or anyone else.
“Alberta has ‘Distracted Driving Laws In Effect’ signs along their highways — we have nothing,” he said, adding that SADD is lobbying for sign placement in this province as well.
Since its inception last fall, SADD has faced the challenges that non-profit organizations face, with so much of that related to funding. Funds are required to launch programs, mount events and get the message out, but the Society finds itself competing for the same pool of dollars as so many others.
“You can’t believe the number of non-profits out there,” Dietrich said. “There is so much demand for non-profit funding. We need support from the community, and local businesses.”
It’s been about a decade since the communications revolution made the smartphone so much a part of our everyday life. With that phenomenon has its negative aspects, not least the use of cellphones while driving, which can result in such devastation — serious injury or death. It might seem to us that it’s been around forever, but SADD is committed to stamping out distracted driving. We can all help. Check out SADD’s website at www.saddbc.ca, or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/saddbc.
