A Belgian road safety group has come up with a novel way to convince young people of the dangers of texting while driving.
Responsible Young Drivers (RYD) took a group of learner drivers in March and told them a recently introduced law meant that if they wanted to pass their licence test they needed to demonstrate they could drive while texting on their phone.
The ‘mobile phone test’ was conducted on a closed course, with the drivers required to navigate a witch’s hat circuit while texting a message read by the instructor in the passenger seat.
The results – seen here in this video, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times since being uploaded to YouTube five days ago and reposted on US site Autoblog – speak for themselves.
RYD says it is important to continue to find new ways of getting safety messages through to young people
“More and more traffic accidents are due to texting,” the group says. “If we want to reduce the 1.2 million traffic victims worldwide each year, we have to act.”
There have been countless studies conducted on the heightened crash risk associated with texting and driving. Among those was a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that found a ‘safety-critical event’ is 163 times more likely to occur if the driver is texting.
Texting, emailing and handling a phone for any other reason while driving is illegal throughout Australia.