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The Dangers of Multitasking
Those young drivers are a major concern. "They use cell phones more than adults generally," says John Ulczycki, executive director of the transportation safety group at the National Safety Council (NSC). "So you have drivers with the least amount of experience willingly taking on high risk."
Last June, the nation grieved after a head-on collision killed five young women on their way to a lakeside cottage in upstate New York to celebrate their recent high school graduation. Later, police said a cell phone belonging to the driver had sent and received text messages just 38 seconds before the first 911 call reported the accident. No one knows whether the driver or a passenger was using the phone.
Supermodel Niki Taylor was severely injured in 2001 when her driver tried to answer a mobile call and plowed into a utility pole. "The driver was just distracted," said a police officer. Taylor was unconscious for two months and required more than 40 operations.
But low-tech distractions can be just as dangerous. In 1999 Stephen King was nearly killed when a driver, distracted by a dog in his van, swerved off a country road and hit the author, who was walking. "He wasn't being reckless," a local sheriff's deputy said of the driver. "He was just distracted."
It's unclear exactly how much of the economic cost of car accidents—currently about $230 billion annually in the United States—can be attributed to distracted driving. That's because not all accidents are reported, and drivers in accidents are reluctant to admit they were changing CDs or putting on lipstick. But NHTSA estimates that driver distraction contributes to 25 percent of all reported accidents.
Bill Windsor of the Office of Safety at Nationwide Insurance believes that's a low-end figure. "It's clear to us that Americans are doing everything in their cars but concentrating on driving," he says. "Distracted driving is increasingly becoming a problem."
Windsor blames our hectic lifestyles. "People have a lot to do and little time to do it, so we've all become multitaskers," he says. "It carries over into the car as well. But driving a car requires focus, so multitasking puts you and others in danger."
That would seem obvious, which is why Nationwide was surprised at some of the survey results. Perhaps the most outrageous admission was from the young San Antonio woman who said she "shaved legs, ate a taco, put on makeup and drank alcohol" while driving. A Memphis, Tennessee, woman bottle-fed her baby—who was in the backseat—while driving. A Sacramento, California, student said she sometimes studied for a test with open notebooks while speeding 75 mph down the highway. Then there was the Phoenix driver who copped to "holding the phone with one hand, curling my hair with the other and driving using my knee." (This was a man, by the way.)
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