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A lot can happen in five seconds.
In five seconds the average person can tie a pair of shoes. In five seconds the average person can walk seven metres, or speed nearly 150 metres down a highway.
And if you, like so many others today, decide to quickly check your phone while you’re speeding down that highway, that will be 150 metres you don’t see anything of.
According to the BC Coalition to End Distracted Driving, the average person takes their eyes off the road for a full five seconds when they’re behind the wheel and they check their phone.
Considering an accident can happen in mere milliseconds, that’s a dangerously long time not to be paying attention. That danger is not merely hypothetical.
From 2010 to 2014, about 81 people lost their lives each year because of distracted driving, meaning it’s now more deadly to text and drive than it is to drink and drive.
Michael Yawney, Q.C., is the senior partner at the Vernon law firm Nixon Wenger. Part of his job is dealing with injury claims, and he says he’s now coming face-to-face with injuries resulting from distracted driving all the time.
“We now see it all too often in the work we do,” he says.
“Everybody does it, it seems. I’ve even caught myself doing it. I had to take a moment and say to myself, ‘what the heck are you doing?’ But there isn’t really a moral stigma attached to texting and driving in our society, and it’s becoming rampant because of that.”
Because of the pervasive nature of the problem, Yawney and other members of the Trial Lawyers Association of BC are in the midst of a campaign to promote more awareness around distracted driving and its consequences.
Yawney says that, while distracted driving is responsible for countless serious crashes and devastating injuries every year, it is also driving up everybody’s insurance rates through the everyday fender benders caused when people think it’s okay to check their phones in traffic.
“When society finally decided it was not OK to drink and drive, and there was a significant social stigma and harsher penalties attached to it, drunk driving rates and fatalities went way down. We want the same thing for distracted driving,” he says.
Yawney encourages everyone who drives to think about how often they see others on the road peeking at their phones, and how often they do it themselves.
He asks parents to talk to their kids, and make sure they take responsibility for what they do with their phones when they’re behind the wheel.
He suggests anyone who needs more motivation visit https://distracteddrivingkills.ca, and listen to just a few of the stories about the impact distracted driving can have on our loved ones’ lives.
It’s going to take some effort to end this “epidemic,” Yawney says, and we’re all going to need to do our part to make that happen.
This article is written by or on behalf of the sponsoring client and does not necessarily reflect the views of Okanagan Edge.
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