The worst possible New Year’s decisions probably don’t seem so terrible at the time.
Drinking and driving — the safety scourge of New Year — gets a lot of press for good reason. That one decision can change your life or even end it.
However, a new spike in traffic related deaths tells experts something else is going on in cars these days. Something deadly: Technology.
In the first six months of 2016, highway deaths rose 10.4 percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, told the New York Times.
Safety officials aren’t alone in their concern. The insurance industry is also convinced that using phones and apps on phones, tablets or laptops, is the biggest cause of the rise in road fatalities,
Robert Gordon, a senior vice president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said in an interview with the New York Times.
When the first examples of tech-distracted driving became obvious a decade ago, the problem was driving while trying to make phone calls or text on a phone.
Response to this problem was to make new cars Bluetooth friendly so that drivers would not have to take their hands off the wheel. Instead, their phones would work right from their cars.
And that has worked well. So well, that now there are a host of apps that also work very well through the car. Result? More Internet use than ever and, possibly, more distraction than ever, as drivers concentrate on podcasts, social media, navigation, and more.
