New Surveillance Campaign Focused on Distractions Whilst Driving

From today, Wednesday, and until Tuesday 13 September, the General Directorate of Traffic will carry out a new specific surveillance campaign that, on this occasion, will focus on distractions whilst driving. The campaign is part of the Operation Focus on the Road developed at a European level by the RoadPol association (European Roads Policing Network).

These types of campaigns are essential to warn of the risks involved in distracted or inattentive driving, since it was present in 32% of all incidents with fatalities recorded in 2021.

For this reason, the Guardia Civil traffic officers will monitor the interurban roads, along with municipal police that join the campaign in the urban area. To this roadside surveillance must be added the automated means available to the DGT with 216 cameras installed on the roads, through which it can be verified, among other things, if the driver uses the mobile while driving.

Driving distractions

The European Road Safety Observatory ERSO collects, in the monographic report on distracted driving that it has just updated, the results of various recent studies based on direct observation of drivers.

It shows that the prevalence of mobile phone use while driving in a car in Europe admitted by drivers is 48% for the use of hands-free devices and, what is more worrying, 29% for talking on a mobile phone without hands-free and 24% to reading text messages or checking social networks.

In this sense, the report also reflects how actions that require looking away from the road or performing manual tasks have a greater impact both on behaviour behind the wheel and on the risk of a collision, this being 3.6 times greater in the case of talking without using the hands-free, 6 times higher when writing a message and 12 times higher in case of dialling a number manually.

For all this, given that the presence of mobile phones while driving has increased exponentially in recent years, causing countless incidents, the reform of the Law on Traffic, Circulation of Motor Vehicles and Road Safety that came into force on Last March, it increased the loss from 3 to 6 points for driving while holding mobile phone devices.

ASPAYM Collaboration

For another year, the ASPAYM National Federation collaborates with the DGT in this campaign involving volunteers with spinal cord injury who will accompany the agents of the Guardia Civil Traffic Group in their road checks in different parts of Spain, with the aim of raising awareness with their presence of the irreversible consequences that a small distraction at the wheel can have.

The collaboration is part of the awareness campaign “Don’t run, don’t drink, don’t change wheels” that they have been carrying out since 2007 and within which different initiatives are included that have personal testimonies as a central axis, proven effective in complementing awareness campaigns.