5 Reasons to Keep Your Cell Phone Out of Reach

When don’t we have our cell phone in hand? It’s how we shop, communicate, bank, research, get directions to new places, take pictures, listen to music, and more. As the mission control center of our lives, smartphones have become an extension of ourselves that is rarely powered off.

But turning it off and tossing it in your car trunk may be required to keep us from using it while driving.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), anything that takes your attention away from driving is a distraction. One of the biggest culprits is, of course, smartphones. More than 220 million people in the United States subscribe to wireless services, and it is estimated that as many as 80 percent of those subscribers use their phones while driving.

For this National Distracted Driving Awareness Month and every month of the year, here are five compelling reasons to turn your cell phone off or keep it out of reach while driving:

1. In 2019, 3,142 people were killed by distracted driving. 
2. It takes about five seconds, on average, to read or send a text. In that short time span, with your eyes on your phone and not on the road, a vehicle travelling 55 miles per hour can travel the length of a football field.
3. Drivers using cell phones look but fail to see up to 50 percent of the information in their driving environment.
4. Cell phone use behind the wheel reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.
5. An estimated 400,000 people were injured in crashes involving distracted drivers in 2018.

In 2018, NAPA launched its national public awareness campaign, WatchForUs (www.WatchFor.us), to encourage drivers across the country to resist distractions and to pay attention while driving, especially through work zones. I encourage you – as a driver, as a friend or loved one of a road construction worker – to visit the WatchFor.Us website and share the powerful videos and messages with your family, friends, and colleagues.