Chula Vista was the site of a distracted driving crackdown recently, as the police made a concerted effort to catch people who were using their cellphones while driving — or just not paying attention in accordance with the rules of the road.
The crackdown yielded 99 driving citations, with 54 of them relating to cellphone use while driving and the remaining 45 relating to texting while driving. The crackdown lasted for only five hours. That’s nearly 20 people per hour violating distracted driving laws, good for a rate of one distracted driver every three minutes. And those are just the drivers that the police saw and caught on that particular day.
There is a lot to learn from this crackdown, and the most obvious fact is that distracted driving is still a massive problem in California. People think that taking out their cellphones while driving isn’t a big deal; they may even think that texting a friend while stopped at a red light doesn’t even constitute “distracted driving;” but the mere fact that a driver is willing to check their cellphone at any time that they are in the driver’s seat means that they are inherently not as focused on the road as they could, and should, be.
Too many people are hurt or killed every year as a result of distracted driving. It’s a needless behavior that needs to be stopped. As a warning to all drivers out there: if you use your cellphone while driving, you run the risk of being held accountable for any accident you may be involved in.
Source: FOX 5, “99 ticketed in crackdown on distracted drivers,” Mike Wille, April 21, 2016
