It takes only a couple of seconds to glance at your cellphone while you’re driving. It takes only that same couple of seconds to kill someone or cripple them for life.
Despite tickets and hefty fines, police officers still see far too many people driving while distracted. Cellphones are the most common distractions, but makeup, food, children and a host of other things can be just as dangerous.
Now Victoria Police have tried a new approach: Instead of paying the $543 ticket, drivers take a three-hour workshop that tries to change behaviour by changing attitudes.
The workshop was the brainchild of Victoria police Const. Sean Millard, and it got support from ICBC, RoadSafety B.C. and the Traffic Injury Research Foundation. The police are co-operating with Restorative Justice Victoria to put on the sessions.
If the project is effective in changing the way people drive, it could save lives and prevent injuries. We can’t put police officers on every street to watch for dangerous driving; the policing has to come from drivers themselves, who recognize the distractions and choose to keep their eyes on the road.
On Dec. 10, 32 drivers took the workshop. They were a significant majority of the 42 who had been ticketed over two days for using an electronic device while driving.
The sessions included cognitive tests that showed participants how hard it is to do even simple tasks when you are distracted. The tests helped them understand how distraction works and the effect it has. Those lessons were reinforced by people such as a retired firefighter, who described extricating people from cars after crashes that were caused by distracted drivers.
For many people, the gut-tightening sight of a police officer leaning into the driver’s window and the pain of shelling out $543 are enough to make them mend their ways. But for others, that experience is too quickly forgotten; the fine is just the “cost of doing business.” Reaching them takes something more, and the workshop could be one tool.
As with other forms of restorative justice, the sessions try to help people understand how their actions affect others. A ticket is just a piece of paper, and money is just money, but other drivers, passengers, pedestrians and cyclists are real people whose lives can be ruined or taken. Seeing them that way can be more effective than any punishment the legal system can throw at us.
It is possible that the people who elect to take the fine over the workshop have learned their lesson, but it’s also possible that some of them reject the message that police and the rest of society are trying to send. Maybe they don’t want to go to the session because they don’t intend to change their driving habits.
Such people are more likely to be repeat offenders.
If the workshop is successful, it might pay to make it mandatory for those repeat offenders. Such drivers clearly aren’t fazed by the fine, so a different approach is worth trying.
Distracted driving causes more serious-injury and fatality crashes than does impaired driving, but it’s clear that many people are too interested in their phones to take that danger seriously.
The workshop was a pilot project. VicPD should keep doing it, and if it helps train safer drivers, it should be copied across the country.
