You’re late for work. The driver ahead of you in heavy rush-hour traffic weaves over the centerline and you wonder if she’s drunk or driving under the influence of something else.

Then you stop for a traffic light and the driver leans to see her reflection in the rearview mirror and dabs at her lashes with a mascara wand.

But this is not a sexist observation, because the distracted driver with whom you’re sharing the road could just as well be a male on a cell phone, slipping in a CD or munching on fast food.

Drivers in local wrecks are just not paying attention, according to Athens Police Capt. Tracy Harrison.

“The biggest causes of local wrecks are speed and inattention,” said Harrison. “They collided with an unseen vehicle. Most of the time if they’d been paying attention, they would have seen the vehicle.”

According to a study by the National Highway Transportation Administration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, eight out of 10 crashes involve drivers who are drowsy, chatting on a cell phone, applying makeup or otherwise distracted from the road ahead.

Researchers reviewed thousands of hours of video and data from sensor monitors linked to more than 200 drivers and found that a wide range of distractions can lead to crashes or near-crashes.

For more than a year, researchers studied the behavior of the drivers of 100 vehicles in northern Virginia and metropolitan Washington, D.C., equipped with video and sensors. They tracked 241 drivers, who were involved in 82 crashes of various degrees of seriousness — 15 were reported to police — and 761 near-crashes.

Called the 100-Car Study, the massive research project analyzed nearly 2 million miles driven and more than 43,300 hours of data.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center accessed the database and drew further conclusions. Dr. Jane Stutts, author of the study, found that

drivers were most often distracted by something outside their vehicle (29.4 percent) followed by adjusting a radio or CD player (11.4 percent). Other distractions included talking with other occupants (10.9 percent), adjusting vehicle or climate controls (2.8 percent), eating or drinking (1.7 percent), cell-phone use (1.5 percent) and smoking (0.9 percent).





Cell phone risk





Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have all passed laws prohibiting talking on hand-held cell phones while driving.

Proposed legislation in this year’s session of the Alabama Legislature didn’t get very far. According to an Associated Press, the bill by state Rep. Jim McClendon never made it out of a state House committee. McClendon had hoped to get the House Public Safety to vote on his bill prohibiting 15, 16 and 17-year-old from using cell phones while driving. Some of the committee members walked out during a hearing on the bill, and too few members were left to vote.

McClendon says the walkout was staged, but he will try again next week to get a vote.

The bill drew support from Voices for Alabama’s Children and the Alabama Academy of Pediatrics, who said it would help reduce teen accidents and fatalities.

Athens Police Officer Jason Sims, who frequently answers traffic accident calls, agrees with Harrison that “most people are just not paying attention.” Sims said there is not a place on the accident report form to indicate if the driver was distracted.

“There’s a lot of reasons people give for not paying attention. It may be kids in the vehicle, and there are some folks who just can’t drive at all,” said Sims. “You just have a better chance of not having an accident if you’re not messing with the radio. I’ve stopped people for speeding and they’ve told me that they didn’t realize they were speeding because they were eating. Most accidents we have are people running into the back of each other because they’re not paying attention. But I’ve never seen a driver get out of the car and say he was distracted by his cell phone.”