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NC's stats:
12.8 Average rank among 50 states on unsafe driving habits.
Unsafe habits as a percentage of car trips April 2016 to March 2017 and rank out of 50 states:
Phone use: 39.9% Rank 15 of 50 states
Speeding: 35.2% Rank 25 of 50 states
Hard braking: 35.7% Rank 4 of 50 states
Risky acceleration: 20.6% Rank 18 of 50 states
Abrupt turn: 19.6% Rank 2 of 50 states
Interesting stuff related to the Southeast:
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Midwesterners are the safest drivers, while Northeasterners speed the most and Southern drivers are most likely to use cellphones while driving.
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Some of the differences may be explained by state laws. Few Southern states, for example, have blanket laws that ban the use of cellphones while driving, according to an assessment of state laws this month by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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Local driving habits and even engineering can make a difference in safety, some traffic analysts say. States that developed after World War II are more dangerous to pedestrians because roads were often built for the convenience of drivers, said Peter Norton, a technology historian at the University of Virginia.
“Florida is a state built around driving … pedestrians are unexpected intruders from an alien planet,” Peter Norton says. That could help explain why Florida has a high rate of pedestrian fatalities. Florida drivers also seem to be a talkative bunch when behind the wheel, which can be distracting. They rank second on Everquote’s list of states with the largest proportion of drivers using phones while driving. Florida also has a high share of elderly drivers — 22 percent are 65 and over, second only to West Virginia, according to national figures.
“Florida is a state built around driving, which means pedestrians are unexpected intruders from an alien planet,” Norton said. “In places where roads are older than cars — especially the Northeast and the Midwest — driving hasn’t taken over to the same degree. You expect people on sidewalks and crossings more, and walkers have better and safer conditions.”
Beyond Florida and Mississippi, drivers in the Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee also use their phones more on the road than do drivers in other parts of the nation — on 41 to 44 percent of their trips, according to the Everquote data.
Like cities in Florida, many in the South are surrounded by suburban sprawl. And Norton said long commutes from the exurbs can tend to force people to do more in their cars.
“When you design worlds around driving, where you can’t do anything without driving, you’re implicitly telling people that they have to do everything in the car — eat, groom themselves, cancel appointments,” he said.
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Hard braking — one sign of distracted driving — is highest in California and New Jersey, two states known for traffic-clogged roads. There, drivers displayed hard braking in about two out of five trips. Yet abrupt turns — another possible sign of inattention — were most common in rural West Virginia (26 percent) and North Carolina (20 percent).
West Virginia banned all use of hand-held cellphones while driving in 2012, and the state credited a drop in fatalities in subsequent years to it. North Carolina, however, has no blanket ban. There are indications that increased regulation may play a role in diminishing some bad driving habits.
Vermont had the lowest rate of cellphone use on the road at 27 percent. Dick Mazza, Democratic chairman of the state Senate’s transportation committee, said that’s no accident. The state banned all hand-held cellphone use while driving in 2014, and has since extended it to cars stopped at lights. It’s also increased fines for using phones in roadwork zones.
“We even put police officers up on snow plows so they can look down and see who’s got phones on their laps out of view,” Mazza said. “It got to be a very serious problem in our small state, and we’re putting a big emphasis on it.” Still, fatalities are up in the state as nearly everywhere else, albeit slightly.
In contrast, state police in Mississippi have complained that anti-texting laws in their state lack teeth. The state has no ban on talking on the phone while driving, except for school bus drivers.
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Not everyone agrees that distraction from new technology is to blame for the recent spike in road-related deaths. Russ Rader, spokesman for the industry-funded Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said other factors are more likely to blame.
“Other things are happening that make driving riskier,” Rader said. “Teens, the riskiest drivers, are coming back into the driving force, and many states are raising speed limits. Study after study shows that increased speeds make crashes more likely, and the crashes that happen are more severe.”
The biggest regional factor, Rader said, is that rural roads are deadlier because they’re often two lanes and have high speed limits.
Bad driving, and citizen complaints, seems to be forcing DOT to implement more four way stops where previously the intersection was two way. I guess the theory being that at least half the drivers at any one intersection are actually paying attention to driving so wrecks are avoided. Sadly that absent a root cause fix, the lowest common denominator wins.
People looking at their phones while driving is getting out of control.
Getting?? It's been out of control.....way out of control.
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