Dr. Bahaa Helmy Writes: Using Social Media While Driving — An Imminent Danger (Part 1)

The eighteen-year-old girl said that everything happened suddenly as she and her friend were returning to Cairo from a private trip to a tourist village so that she could join her sister in celebrating her birthday: the car her friend was driving lurched to the left and crashed into the concrete barriers between the road and the opposite carriageway while her friend was busy with her phone, causing the car to overturn; she was taken to hospital and does not know what happened to her friend, the driver. It turned out that the girl driving the car died instantly, leaving behind her mobile phone with a text message on its screen saying “We'll meet in an hour at...”; but she was unable to specify the place, because the accident happened before she could finish the sentence that distracted her from the steering wheel and kept her from paying attention to the road, and so the accident occurred. There may be no accurate studies or statistics on the number of car accidents resulting from being busy with a mobile phone or using it to visit electronic communication sites while driving, whether at the national or the international level, but we will shed light on a number of reports that indicate how dangerous this act is. The statistics announced by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in its report for the first half of 2018 revealed that the main cause of car accidents in Egypt is the human element, at 75.7%; the reports indicate that the human losses resulting from car accidents in Egypt amounted to 17.7 thousand deaths and injuries and that the financial cost of accidents reached 28.9 billion Egyptian pounds in 2017, and the report did not indicate the type of faulty conduct or mistaken human behavior that led to these accidents. At the international level, the World Health Organization warns of traffic accidents, which claim the lives of 1.35 million people a year; the organization indicates that road accidents kill one person every 24 seconds in the world, and that 48% of traffic accidents in the world are among people aged between 15 and 44. Males are more likely than females to be involved in traffic accidents, and about three-quarters (73%) of deaths from traffic accidents are among young males under the age of 25. The organization attributed the causes of accidents to the lack of road safety measures, driving under the influence of alcohol, drug use, unsafe road infrastructure, failure to use motorcycle helmets, seat belts and child restraints, technical causes in vehicles with technical defects, inadequate post-crash care, inadequate enforcement of traffic laws, and also inattention while driving, which is the subject of this article. Some studies in one of the countries of the European Union indicate that about 300 thousand of the roughly 204 million road accidents every year in Germany are caused by using a mobile phone and visiting social media sites while driving; the study's results also concluded that many drivers are addicted to using these means, and practice the hobby of taking pictures with their phones and posting them on their personal pages while sitting behind the wheel at various speeds, and that this may take place in a few seconds, but these are sometimes the dividing line between life and death. The truth is that everyone can observe and follow the growing phenomenon of using mobile phones while driving in the streets and while traveling on the main roads and axes in Egypt. The use is no longer limited to talking directly on mobile phones without earphones, but has extended to many car drivers visiting social media sites and writing and exchanging messages; and the spread of this phenomenon is noticeable in the streets of Cairo among young people, as in many countries of the world, which entails grave dangers and consequences. Being busy using a mobile phone and dealing with social media sites while driving distracts attention, which most often leads to impaired driving and is a growing source of concern about road safety. Drivers who use mobile phones are also about four times more exposed than others to the risk of traffic accidents, according to the reports of the World Health Organization.