By: Jay Winsten
I was driving at 50 mph, in the passing lane of a local four-lane road, navigating numerous twists and turns on my way home. I counted 47 oncoming cars, each of which was separated from me by a mere four feet across the double yellow line. We were closing on each other at a combined speed of 100 mph, moments away from a possible head-on crash. All it would take, I thought, was for one driver to drift across the yellow line -- while sending a text message, dialing a call, or adjusting a multimedia system -- and I could instantly become the latest casualty of distracted driving.
We seldom think about the high degree of trust we place in an oncoming driver. It does indeed take a village to get home safely! And, sometimes it doesn't work out. At any given daylight moment across the U.S., approximately 660,000 drivers are using electronic devices. In 2011, 3,331 people lost their lives and 387,000 suffered injuries in crashes involving a distracted driver.
The problem of distracted driving exploded onto the public and policy agendas over the past several years. Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who made it his signature initiative while in office, deserves immense credit for creating a national movement to address the problem. Companies like AT&T, State Farm, Allstate and Toyota, and nonprofits like the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, have made important contributions to the effort, along with numerous grassroots organizations.
However, notwithstanding the sharp increase in awareness of the problem that has been achieved in recent years, studies suggest that we're not yet making a significant dent in changing drivers' behavior. Which raises the obvious question, why not?
And, what will it take to turn this problem around? Moreover, why did another campaign https://sites.google.com/view/instagramviewer -- the designated-driver campaign against drunk driving -- succeed? And what's different about the distracted-driving problem?
It was 25 years ago this month that the Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Health Communication, which I direct, launched the U.S. Designated Driver Campaign in collaboration with leading TV networks and Hollywood studios. Starting in 1988, my colleagues and I sought to demonstrate how a new social concept, the "designated driver," could be rapidly diffused through American society via mass communication, catalyzing a fundamental shift in social norms relating to driving-after-drinking.