Hang up and drive
The vehicle Jacy and her parents were in following their car accident in May 2008.
Jacy Good, co-founder of Hang Up and Drive, spoke at a recent industry event attended by AECOM employees during the company’s Safety Week at the end of April. Here, Good retells her story and makes the case for banning all forms of cell phone use while driving, in the name of safety.
During a speaking engagement, Jacy discusses the dangers of cell phone use while driving.
While my parents and I drove home from my college graduation in May 2008, we were involved in a three-vehicle collision caused by a driver talking hands-free on his cell phone, doing what we’re often told is “safe.” The dairy truck that struck our family station wagon put an end to my parents’ 58 years of life and left me with a 10 percent chance of surviving the night. Impeccable medical care kept me alive and four months later, after several potentially deadly setbacks, I was stable enough to return home. It was then that I began to understand what happened to leave me in such excruciating physical and emotional pain.
Jacy and her family at her college graduation the morning of their accident.
Since that day seven years ago, I have learned to live in my partially paralyzed body and spend my days trying to prevent other families from having to endure the agony that touched my life. I began by working toward stricter legislation regarding cell phone use behind the wheel, with moderate success. Today, I live in New York state, where we have some of the strongest laws in the entire country, and I have yet to find a day where I haven’t seen a driver making the phone a priority over the road.
Jacy and her husband danced after one of Jacy’s rehabilitation sessions following the accident.
As a result, my mission has transformed from legislation to behavioral and cultural change. Laws don’t necessarily change habits, but helping people to understand the very real potential ramifications of their actions through education can and has made that change. In the last four years, I’ve been privileged to share my story at more than 500 different events nationwide, including the recent Enbridge Pipeline Construction Safety Roundtable that many AECOM employees attended in Dallas, Texas, during their company’s Safety Week.
The largest of my goals in these presentations is to dispel the notion that texting is the main culprit in distracted-driving crashes. According to the U.S. National Safety Council, it is actually cell phone calls, not texting, that cause the significant majority of the approximately 1.4 million phone-related crashes on U.S. roads annually. Additionally, there are more than 30 studies proving that a hands-free device does almost nothing to alleviate the danger; it is the cognitive demand of the conversation that makes the driver four times more likely to crash, not whether or not the phone is being held. This doesn’t mean that it is safe to text and drive, but this information is meant to point out the real danger of talking on the phone while driving — hands-free or not.
A recent photo of Jacy and her husband, Steve Johnson.
Over time, public knowledge and laws will reflect this reality, but for now, it is up to us to make the change in our driving habits. There is encouraging headway being made in the corporate world, including at AECOM. Well over half of all Fortune 500 companies have banned employee cell phone use while driving. Polls have shown that 83 percent of those individuals whose companies ban distracted driving have reduced or eliminated their phone use while driving on their own time as well.
When it comes down to it, this is a human issue. These crashes might impact corporations, but they destroy families and ripple throughout entire communities. Momentum is building, and I urge you to join the fight. Do it for yourself, for your family and for everyone else who shares the road with you. It’s as simple as this — Hang Up and Drive.
Jacy Good, co-founder of Hang Up and Drive, is a speaker-advocate on the well-researched and widely recognized dangers of cell phone use while driving. Jacy lives in New York with her husband Steve Johnson and has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, at Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference, and at the United Nations with Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.
LinkedIn: Jacy Good
Twitter: @JacyGood