A one-day blitz of drivers across the region last week revealed what a lot of us might have suspected, but it is still shocking to see the worst of our driving habits.
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Across the Oxley police command – the area centred around Tamworth – we are the worst offenders for using our mobile phones while trying to drive.
In one day last week police pulled over nine drivers talking on their phone.
While other regional drivers, in the Barwon and New England zones for example, are worse at other things like speeding in school zones or defective or illegal or substandard car parts, they too tend to juggle the phone and the wheel.
In Barwon, five were caught on that day last week, and in New England there were six.
The results come in the wake of media headlines only last week of young women drivers killed while talking on their mobiles.
The images are stark. The statistics are a deadly reminder of how easy it is to get yourself killed – or kill someone else – with a car.
Those driving habits and the increasing incidence of them are obviously behind the recent road safety Get Your Hand Off It campaign warning drivers of the dangers of illegal mobile phone use.
The use of mobile phones while driving has been identified by the Centre for Road Safety as a growing issue that research suggests could be a significant contributing factor in road crashes in NSW.
The Get Your Hand Off It campaign challenges the excuses that drivers come up with to justify their illegal use of mobiles.
While two-thirds of the driving population agree that using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous, statistics show many still do it.
From July 2010 to June 2011, 52,680 fines were issued to drivers in NSW for using hand-held mobile phones.
And data from 2006 to 2010 indicates that there were 157 crashes where hand-held mobile phone use by drivers was identified as a contributing factor.
Those figures included four fatal crashes, 66 injury crashes and 87 tow-away crashes.
But, as the Centre for Road Safety in NSW reports, while crash risks are well documented, the crash numbers are under-reported because of the difficulty of establishing evidence of illegal mobile-phone use at crash scenes.
Research shows that males and females aged 17-39 years have the highest rates of mobile phone ownership and highest rate of claimed use while driving. Commercial drivers reportedly use hand-held mobile phones on at least a quarter of their trips.
We need to take those sobering stats on board and drive the messages to the rest.
