New video warns of
distracted driving
Bob Golfen | The Arizona Republic | Feb. 16, 2007 12:00 AM
A Scottsdale man's obsession with the deadly problem of driving distractions has produced a video and Web site that's being promoted by Arizona safety and law-enforcement officials.
"We're letting the public know there's a problem out there and showing them how to deal with it," said Bob Brown, the driver-safety professional who created the new campaign, called the Toe Tag Project.
Officials with the Department of Public Safety, Governor's Office of Highway Safety and the Arizona Chapter of the National Safety Council are conducting a news conference today to support Brown's effort.
Driver distractions, ranging from cellphones to eating behind the wheel, are blamed for as many as half the 139,000 collisions that occurred in Arizona during 2005, killing more than 1,100 people and injuring 70,000 others, said DPS Officer Tim Mason, a department spokesman.
"The problem is pretty significant," Mason said.
Brown's effort is an important step toward helping people deal with distractions in their own driving habits, Mason added.
"It isn't just the video. It's the whole campaign, the message that it sends," he said. "What the message says to the motoring public: if you drive distracted, you run a 50 percent chance of having a collision. And some of them are deadly."
Brown, the director of Safety Perspectives Inc., said his 29-minute video is designed to provide an entertaining way to enforce the message. The video is now being used by state-sanctioned driving classes, schools and businesses, and he wants to widen the audience to help lower Arizona's crash rate.
"What we hope is that a good bunch of knowledge presented in this format will make it stick in people's