Avoid the $124 ticket. Don’t get you or anyone else killed. Put down the phone.
That’s the reminder coming from state traffic officials ahead of extra emphasis patrols, which start Friday, targeting distracted drivers. The extra patrols will run through April 14.
Shelly Baldwin, the legislative and media relations manager at the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, said researchers in the state have found that at any given point, 1 in 10 drivers are distracted while behind the wheel.
The University of Washington’s Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center found, after watching drivers in six counties, that nearly half of those distracted drivers were fiddling with their cellphones.
It seems to be a “lizard brain” thing, Baldwin said: People can’t resist new information or stimuli.
She sets her phone to mute when driving just to avoid the temptation, she said.
“It’s hard not to know what that beep means,” she said.
Baldwin, referring to research done by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, said it can take up to 30 seconds for the brain to switch gears from talking or texting back to driving.
This will be the third year of special emphasis patrols through the traffic safety commission. Baldwin said the number of tickets issued for driving and cellphone use tends to spike during the special patrols, hinting at how tenacious of a problem distracted driving is.
“We don’t want people getting cellphone tickets, we want people to keep their eyes on the road, their hands on the wheel and to put their cellphones away,” Baldwin said.
