Texting and driving a growing risk
October 11, 2019
We’ve been doing a lot of work with different organisations over the last few years to help design and evaluate road safety campaigns, particularly around driver distraction.
But new stats we recently collected for RAC as part of evaluating their ‘Look Up’ campaign reveals a worrying trend — phone use while driving continues to rise, with almost half of WA drivers admitting to texting behind the wheel.
This is despite virtually all of them knowing how dangerous it is!
Phone use while driving is upsettingly common among most age groups. But it’s younger drivers who are most at risk, with 17-39 year-olds three times as likely to use their phone while driving at high speed.
There’s no shortage of social marketing and public campaigns trying to stem this dangerous behaviour, in Australia and across the globe…
…but WA’s road toll continues to rise, with more deaths attributable to phone-related distraction each year.
This is clearly a challenging behaviour to shift and one that runs deep in our current society – but now more than ever is good quality research needed to find the most effective ways of tackling it, and reducing the heartbreaking and avoidable loss of life on our roads.
