Distracted driving and speed differentials make a dangerous combo

Distracted driving leads to thousands of fatalities each year.

During a Senate committee meeting in the spring, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that it’s a problem that has worsened since the start of the pandemic.

“With the return to the roads and more people on the roads than we saw early in the pandemic, we’re seeing less of the speeds that we saw then,” Buttigieg said. “But it would appear that there’s a higher-than-ever rate of distracted driving.”

According to 2020 statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 3,142 people died in distracted driving crashes.

“Distracted driving is any activity that diverts attention from driving, including talking or texting on your phone, eating and drinking, talking to people in your vehicle, fiddling with the stereo, entertainment or navigation system – anything that takes your attention away from the task of safe driving,” the NHTSA website states.

“Texting is the most alarming distraction. Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for 5 seconds. At 55 mph, that’s like driving the length of an entire football field with your eyes closed. You cannot drive safely unless the task of driving has your full attention. Any nondriving activity you engage in is a potential distraction and increases your risk of crashing.”

With a bird’s-eye view from their cab, truck drivers know all too well how prevalent cellphone use and texting while driving is among passenger vehicle drivers.

And it’s a problem that could be exacerbated by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposal to mandate speed-limiting devices on most commercial motor vehicles.

There are areas in the United States where the speed limit is as high as 85 mph. In addition, 75 mph and 80 mph zones are not uncommon. Add in that the flow of traffic can often exceed the speed limit, and it’s quite possible that a truck governed at 60 mph could be forced to go 25-30 mph slower than other vehicles on the same road.

Now consider that distracted driving is at an all-time high along with NHTSA’s data about how far a vehicle can travel when being distracted even for only a few seconds.

It doesn’t take too big of a leap to imagine a driver with the cruise set at 80 mph in a 75 mph zone, looking “just real quick” at his or her phone to read an incoming text. Suddenly, the car is closing in on the rear end of a tractor-trailer that seemed much farther away when they looked at their phone just a few seconds earlier.

“You complain about accidents involving trucks versus cars,” truck driver Richard Bouchard wrote. “That will be tenfold by having commercial trucks doing 65 while cars are traveling at 75 or even faster because of distraction like tuning in their radio, talking on cellphones or texting. What you need to figure out is how to jam cells from working while in motion. Distracted driving is the major problem, not speed.”

More than 14,000 individuals, motor carriers and organizations have already submitted comments on FMCSA’s speed limiter proposal. Hundreds of those comments come from truck drivers who say distracted driving is the real problem.

“Stop with regulating trucks,” RMD Trucking wrote. “Nine out of 10 cars I bypass are on their phones.”

Ed Simpson is one of the hundreds of truck drivers who say a speed limiter mandate would force them to leave the industry.

“The differential in speeds will cause a significant increase in interaction between cars and trucks which will probably lead to more accidents,” Simpson wrote. “As a longtime driver and owner I can tell you that the majority of people are driving distracted and if there is a difference in speeds the chance of an accident increases. I encourage you to watch people on your commute to your office to see what I am talking about. Please rethink your proposal. If this proposal does pass, I unfortunately will stop driving and close my trucking company with 11 trucks.” LL