A smashed-up car served as a prop Friday morning for a rally against distracted driving held on the Statehouse lawn in Montpelier. Photo by Ellie French/VTDigger
Sharon Huntley’s son, Spencer, was driving to class one morning in 2011 when he looked down at his phone. He then swerved into an oncoming milk truck, dying instantly in the crash.
On Friday, Huntley was joined by more than 50 advocates outside the Statehouse to rally against distracted driving.
“How many of us are guilty of the same thing? I wasn’t above a quick glance down at my phone to check something,” Huntley said. “I’m more careful now. I’ve learned what can be lost in the blink of an eye.”
The rally, hosted by AAA of Northern New England, is part of a campaign to help make distracted driving as socially unacceptable as drunk driving. T-shirts and signs were plastered with the slogan “Don’t drive intoxicated. Don’t drive intexticated.”
Between 2012 and 2015, distracted driving accounted for 11% of fatal crashes in Vermont, according to Michael Pieciak, Vermont’s commissioner of financial regulation.
“And those statistics continue to go up, unfortunately,” Pieciak said.
The speakers said one thing they are trying to combat is the notion that only young people are culpable. They said these days, adults are just as likely to have a cellphone in their hands.
“The AAA campaign is targeting those drivers who would never ever think about driving intoxicated, but would think it’s OK to use their phone while driving,” said Pat Moody, the group’s director of public affairs. “So it is targeting those adult drivers.”
Huntley, meanwhile, likes to focus on young drivers. She talks about her son’s experience to driver’s education classes, so they know the risks before they ever get behind the wheel of a car. When she asks students to compare times they’ve ridden in a friend’s car while that person was texting and when they’ve ridden with parents who are texting and driving, the responses she gets are pretty similar.
“Parents don’t realize that they’re modeling behaviors that their children are going to copy,” Huntley said. “I like to talk to groups before they’ve already established their habits.”
One way to help bring down the state’s distracted driving numbers, Pieciak said, is to toughen the consequences. He said in 2011, a ticket for distracted driving would bring a Vermonter’s insurance up by 0.2%. Today, he said, it would increase by more like 16%.
Pat Moody of AAA speaks Friday morning at a rally against distracted driving that was held on the Statehouse lawn in Montpelier. Photo by Ellie French/VTDigger
“Here in Vermont, we enjoy some of the lowest insurance rates in the country,” Pieciak said. “But also in Vermont, we’re at risk for having our insurance rates increase more than any other state when we have a distracted driving incident.”
Huntley said today, her son would have been 25 years old. Though she said she’s made peace with what had happened, she hasn’t made peace with the distracted driving epidemic that she believes has continued.
“His former classmates are thriving in their jobs. They’re getting married, they’re having children of their own,” she said. “We’ve had to make peace with those things being over for Spencer, and for us. But what he can do is inspire us all to think about what we will do with our own phones, and what behaviors we will model for our children.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Advocates want distracted driving to be as unacceptable as drunk driving.