Driving distractions — like using cellphones, reading a novel, or shaving — one city traffic cop has seen it all.
There were 39,762 collision in Calgary in 2009, up from 39,542 in 2008, according to the Calgary Police Service Traffic Division, and avoiding these unfortunate traffic events is simple, says Traffic Education Const. Jim Lebedeff.
“We live in such a busy society this day and age, a lot of peoples’ vehicles are their offices now, so they’re texting, they’ve got laptops, they’ve got GPS, they’ve got their BlackBerrys, they are making their appointments on the way to the office,” said Lebedeff.
Lebedeff says adequate preparation for driving conditions and pulling over to use cellphones are easy fender-bender fixes.
Driving needs full attention at all times, he said, kids can dart out from parked cars, traffic can be coming to a stand still in an instant while checking an email, all this can be avoided just by paying attention.
“People are multitasking in their vehicles and they shouldn’t be,” said Lebedeff.
Alberta is looking at bringing in a distracted-driving law instead of only a law surrounding cellphone usage while driving, said Lebedeff.
“I believe they said they were going to bump it up to the spring time,” said Lebedeff.
