U Drive - U Text - U Pay Campaign

Mullica Township Police Department

 

From April 10 to 15, 2015, law enforcement personnel will be using a combination of traditional and innovative strategies to crack down on motorists who text while driving. This effort is a part of the national U Drive. U Text. U Pay high-visibility enforcement campaign that combines intense enforcement of anti-texting laws with advertising and media outreach to let people know about the enforcement and convince them to obey the law.
In 2013, 3,154 people were killed and an estimated additional 424,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes involv¬ing distracted drivers. This represents a 6.7 percent decrease in the number of fatalities recorded in 2012.

According to a 2014 special article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the risk of a crash or near-crash among novice drivers increased with the performance of many secondary tasks, including texting and dialing cell phones.
The University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute’s 2012 “Teen Driver Distraction Study” reports that a quarter of teens respond to a text message once or more every time they drive, and 20 percent of teens and 10 percent of parents admit that they have extended, multi-message text conversations while driving.