By Wayne Gates
Last year, 55 Ohioans were killed in distracted driving crashes.
According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, 13,997 of those crashes occurred in 2017.
“Your cell phone will kill you if you don’t use better judgement,” said Lieutenant Randy McElfresh of the Ohio Highway Patrol.
A new law designed to reduce distracted driving crashes went into effect on Oct. 29.
“The law requires an enhanced financial penalty in addition to existing fines or alternatively the completion of a distracted driver course, for drivers who commit a specific traffic violation while distracted,” said McElfresh.
“For example, a driver operating a vehicle outside marked lanes who is also engaging in a distracted behavior like on a cell phone, will face an enhanced fine of up to $100 in addition to a fine for the primary violation.”
The distracted driving violation is a secondary violation, meaning that it cannot be the primary reason that a law enforcement officer pulls a driver over.
“Historically, we have had a history of people here in Brown County driving left of center and causing crashes,” McElfresh said.
“We see people who drift left of center or drift off the right side of the roadway all the time. They are also exceeding the speed limit or going too slowly. We come up behind them and see them commit these violations and many times they are talking on a cell phone.”
McElfresh said that many drivers get complacent about driving because they drive the same route without incident so often that it becomes routine.
“They don’t think about the fact that you’ve got a margin of error of about two feet when driving a 3000 pound bullet that could kill someone instantly. A drivers side headlight to drivers side headlight impact is one of the most violent impacts that there is,” he said.
McElfresh said that the problem of electronic distractions has skyrocketed since be joined the OHP.
“Back when I started in the early 1990’s, the only electronic devices we were dealing with were pagers. And now, you have a device that controls many aspects of some people’s lives and they are having a hard time separating from it while driving,” he said.
The new law offers drivers the chance to have the extra $100 fine waived if they complete a distracted driving course.
The course can be found on the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle’s Driver Training website (https://www.drivertraining.ohio.gov).
