Resolve to slam brakes on daredevil driving in 2016

“Click It Or Ticket.” “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over.”

“Speed Kills.”

“U Drive. U Text. U Pay.”

Such catchy bumper-sticker slogans and stark billboard catchphrases have become prominent parts of the driving landscape in recent years. Sadly, however, too many state motorists pay too little heed to their life-saving messages.

But as newly released preliminary data on Ohio traffic crashes in 2015 illustrate, such slick-sounding safety pleas should not be ignored or become targets of snarky derision. They have real-life applications that too often produce real-world tragedies to the thousands of disobedient daredevils who choose to ignore them.

The proof is in the sobering statistics released by the Ohio State Highway Patrol over the weekend that indicate a nearly 10 percent increase in traffic fatalities in the Buckeye State in 2015 over 2014. Closer to home, the 36 fatal traffic crashes in Mahoning and Trumbull counties represent an even more alarming 20 percent rise over 2014 levels.

The data set validates the need for ongoing aggressive enforcement of responsible driving behaviors by our vigilant OSHP troopers and other law-enforcement agencies. More importantly, it reinforces the need for more Ohioans to transform those haunting slogans into defensive driving strategies.

CLICK IT TO LESSEN RISK

Take the “Click It Or Ticket” campaign, for example. Despite OSHP officers handing out more than 116,000 seat-belt violation citations in 2015, including more than 9,000 in the Mahoning Valley, roughly 60 percent of all fatal traffic crashes last year in Ohio involved someone not wearing a seat belt, Lt. Craig Cvetan, a patrol spokesman, said last week.

Though buckling up would not have prevented all of those fatalities, many undoubtedly would have been avoided. In 2014, for example, an estimated 12,802 lives were saved in the U.S. by motorists who took the two seconds to properly click in, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

As for impaired driving, those 25,000 Ohioans who chose not to drive sober and were pulled over by OSHP in 2015 should count themselves among the lucky. Because of such needed interdiction, they will not be counted in the toll of approximately 3,300 who lost their lives in Operating a Vehicle Impaired-related crashes in Ohio in 2015.

That number represents about one-third of all fatal crashes in the state. In Mahoning County last year, the toll was even higher as about 50 percent of all fatal vehicle accidents were OVI-related, according to the OSHP.

Increasingly, irresponsible use of cellphones and other electronic devices while navigating a car or truck has become just as dangerous as using alcohol while or shortly before taking the wheel. Texting while driving has become the top cause of death among teenagers. It also is playing a larger and larger role in crashes among adults, a fact that should motivate state legislators in 2016 to at long last make texting while driving a primary motor-vehicle infraction.

COLUMBIANA COUNTY BUCKS TREND

Despite this wealth of discouraging traffic-crash data, one bright spot emerges in the Mahoning Valley. That spot is Columbiana County where fatal traffic crashes nose-dived a whopping 60 percent from 16 in 2014 to seven in 2015. Perhaps a greater majority of the largely rural county’s residents prefer to click it to avert a ticket. Perhaps more of them opt not to imbibe and drive. Or perhaps most of them understand the importance of focusing on the winding road path and not a beeping text-message screen.

Whatever the primary reason, the county’s success in significantly reducing traffic deaths last year serves as a goal for all counties to meet or exceed.

Coupled with even more aggressive enforcement of the rules of the road by troopers and other road rangers, adopting consistent safe-driving behaviors should serve as a collective new year’s resolution for all motorists. In so doing, we can go the distance toward significantly reducing the unacceptably high and largely preventable toll of road carnage throughout our state.