SACRAMENTO >> California Highway Patrol officer Kory Reynolds, of the Clear Lake Area office, was on his way home from work one evening when an oncoming car crossed into his lane. He yanked his vehicle off the road onto an embankment.
“I could see into her car,” he recalled. “She was on a cell phone.”
What many drivers notice every day became an official concern Tuesday, as a new study revealed that nearly 10 percent of drivers statewide are using their cell phones while driving, up by 39 percent from last year.
That is a shocking and lethal fact, said Ronda Craft, director of the state Office of Traffic Safety, which co-sponsored the study. “Discouraging drivers from operating a vehicle while distracted is a challenge that law enforcement is faced with year-round,” said CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow.
Both officials spoke of the need for education campaigns to make drivers pay attention to the road.
This year, 9.2 percent of motorists were spotted using a cell phone while driving, up from 6.6 percent of drivers in 2014, the CHP and the Traffic Safety Office said in a news release.
“It’s really alarming,” Reynolds said, adding that he believes the situation is probably worse than the data shows.
The study was based upon observation. When officers ask people involved in an accident if they had been using a phone to talk, text or check the Internet, the answer is generally negative.
Reynolds considers 15 percent a more accurate figure for distracted drivers on California roads. In April he conducted a cell phone check along one stretch of Lake County highway. In four hours he wrote eight tickets for cell phone use while driving.
“I knew it had to be getting worse,” he said. “The statistics should scare you.”
Driver inattention is a factor in 80 percent of vehicle crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and some 3,000 people were killed nationwide last year in collisions involving a distracted driver, according to the release. So far this year, 13 people have died in Lake County as a result of vehicle accidents.
Texting takes a driver’s eyes off the road for an average of five seconds — enough time to travel the length of a football field, essentially driving blindfolded for 120 yards, according to the study.
The highest level of distracted driving was 10.8 percent of motorists using a cell phone in 2012.
During Distracted Driving Awareness Month in April this year, officers ticketed more than 46,000 drivers using a cell phone while driving, roughly double the number usually issued in a month.
The study was conducted by the Traffic Safety office and UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center.
Andrew McGall is a writer for the Bay Area News Group
