Moments after leaving USA TODAY‘s offices in suburban Virginia on Saturday evening, Senior Editor John Siniff hopped on Interstate 66 for a quick drive home. The skies were overcast, a light mist was falling, and the sun was beginning to set.
A young woman speeding along in the lanes behind him was lost in a phone conversation when the 2,500 pounds of metal she was piloting slammed into his vehicle from behind.
He never even heard the tires squeal. Her brakes didn’t strain — because she hadn’t applied them.
After they drove their cars to the shoulder, she confessed two things to John: She had been driving for only two months and, naively, admitted that she was just finishing up a conversation with her friend when she hit him. Whether by phone or text, it matters not.
We all have stories of watching motorists so lost in their devices or conversations that they might as well be in some other place. Mentally, they are.
Statistics confirm how bad things have gotten:
• About 660,000 drivers in the USA are using handheld cellphones while driving at any moment during daylight hours. This number has held steady since 2010, according to the National Occupant Protection Use Survey.
• More than half of drivers — 55% — admit to using a mobile phone at least some of the time while driving, according to Expedia’s 2014 Road Rage Report, a survey of 1,001 licensed drivers conducted this past spring.
• Accidents as a result of distracted driving are too often fatal — 3,328 people died in such crashes in 2012, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and 421,000 were injured.
State laws have been playing catch-up, and it’s now illegal to text while driving in every state except Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas. A just-published report in the August Journal of Public Health found that such primary texting bans have led to a 3% decline in traffic deaths among all age groups.
Such bans targeting young drivers have coincided with an 11% drop in fatalities among 15- to 21-year-olds. Yet enforcement of these laws has been scarce and uneven at best.
In this case, the state trooper sent them on their way. This experience — though frightening and painful — is in many ways the best-case scenario. Too many parents are burying teens whose fatal mistake was to respond to an incoming text. Too many families are shattered because of the selfish impulses of a tech-crazed culture mesmerized by glowing screens.
The other driver had the audacity to text John with a request that he not go through her insurance company with the claim.
“I intend to have a clean record,” she wrote.
John ignored her request.
Here’s the thing: No matter how careful, conscientious and deliberate we are in going about our daily lives, we’re vulnerable to someone else’s reckless choices.
And there’s a good chance that we’ll never even hear the tires squeal.
John Siniff is a senior editor at USA TODAY.
