Road Rants: It’s simple — distracted driving kills
Forrest Cepeda of Bend was just 16 years old when a texting driver hit and killed him. The driver had been texting two women, one of whom was sitting right next to him in the passenger’s seat.
His mother, Melissa Howiler, vividly recalls what happened on that day, eight years ago: “My dad showed up at my house with a police officer and a priest and told me my son had been killed by a texting driver, and I just dropped to my knees.”
The accident happened on the corner of Reed Market Road and Pettigrew Road. The truck’s trailer spun and hit Forrest, who was riding his bike, throwing him into a lava rock wall. The teen was killed instantly.
In 2015, 3,477 people died in the United States because of distraction-related accidents on the road, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and about another 400,000 people were hurt.
Howiler has a message for distracted drivers: “I want to say to them, ‘Do you think I not see you?’ I wish I had a picture of my son and I could say, ‘This is my kid. He’s no longer here because of what you’re doing.'”
Oregon Department of Transportation reports show that in Oregon, a distracted driver causes a crash every 2 1/2 hours. That works out to about 10 crashes per day.
Dr. Sean Dodge of Vista Psychology in Bend says shifting your attention while you’re behind the wheel “requires a great deal of processing very, very quickly – constantly – especially driving at high speeds.” He says even after just a few seconds, drivers lose a lot of information that could potentially be quite dangerous for others on the road.
“Our minds are lazy,” he adds, meaning If we don’t have to put forth a lot of mental energy, we won’t. “So any task that we do often or repeating like driving, our mind has a tendency to drift.”
Oregon ranks ninth in the country, when it comes to people using a phone while driving, as reported by ODOT. Dodge says, “People feel a tremendous pressure of missing out or of feeling like they’re going to be late with something.”
So if people know driving while distracted is bad and potentially deadly, why do drivers still do it?
“Unfortunately, it’s because a lot of the time, we’ll get away with it,” says Dodge, “They don’t get that response that this is a problem — there’s no consequence there’s no punishment.. And they’re going to keep trying, because they can do it again.”
For some, these consequences are just an abstract theory. But for Howiler and her family, the consequences are something she has to face every single day.
