National Distracted Driving Awareness Month

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month and the Ohio State Highway Patrol is reminding drivers to keep your eyes and focus on the road.

Texting, eating and playing with the radio are just a few of the ways someone can be distracted while driving. Lieutenant Matt Boyd with the Ohio State Highway Patrol Zanesville Post said there are three types of distracted driving that continue to become an increasing problem.

“There’s manual, visual and cognitive. Manual would be like taking your hands off the wheel to eat, messing with a book or newspaper, messing with the radio, something like that,” Lieutenant Boyd said. “Visual is taking your eyes off the road to look at a text message or look at a passenger or something like that and then cognitive is taking your mind off of the task at hand of driving.”

Lieutenant Boyd said the reason texting while driving is so dangerous is because it includes all three types so you are 23 times as likely to get into an accident.

“Last year in Ohio there were almost 14,000, it was 13,727 crashes that were related to distracted driving and those were crashes that either we had evidence to substantiate that or the drivers admitted that they were distracted while they were driving. Of those, 47 of the crashes were fatalities, which killed 51 people,” Lieutenant Boyd said.

In Muskingum County last year there were 112 distracted driver crashes. Lieutenant Boyd said those numbers are on a curve because there are accidents that occur that do not provide proof of distracted driving.