For many people in today’s busy world, the urgency to take phone calls or messages whilst driving is too much and the results can be fatal.
The Road Safety Commission’s statistics have proven that phone distraction can be as risky as drink driving, increasing your likelihood of having a crash by up four times.
Texting while driving slows your reaction time by half, increasing the risk of a crash.
These shocking statistics were enough to push one young local woman into producing an award-winning road safety campaign.
Jessie Smith from Kelmscott has produced her own campaign ‘The world can wait’ which has caught the attention of higher ups, such as Road Safety Minister David Michael who spoke about Jessie’s campaign in WA Parliament last week.
Jessie, who herself is in the target audience of 17- to 25-year-old drivers, said her motivation for coming up with the campaign was due to personal experience.
“I am a pretty busy human and get stressed with life and I worked for someone who made me feel like I always had to use my phone,” Jessie said.
“I did some research for an assignment at North Metropolitan TAFE and interviewed people as to why they used phones and what they were doing. They were in the 17 to 25-year-old bracket.
“The results highlighted what I thought, people felt there was urgency and had to answer their phone calls and text messages. Most of the time people said it was to change maps and changing songs but there was a large portion of answering texts and calls.
“I had one beautiful person in Google forms, which were anonymous and all the juicy stuff came out. I had that one person say ‘the world can wait and anyone trying to get in contact with me can wait until I get to where I am going.’
“I thought that was it,” she said.
Jessie’s billboard is now on display at key points across the city and on various other platforms.
She said the response to her campaign has been overwhelming.
“It’s been crazy,” she said.
“They’ve been running this campaign as a TAFE program and it was my dream to see it on the big screen and the whole campaign has expanded in a good way.
“I did a radio interview yesterday and have been mentioned by RAC and a Curtin Uni student has written a paper about it and recently in Parliament.
“The exposure from the campaign has been really good. I am glad it’s being shared around because it is such an important message.
“Today on the way to TAFE on Tonkin Highway I drove past an accident and there was a body in a bag. People need to slow down and think.
It’s nuts being on the road at the moment, they don’t care, it’s really terrifying and they need to take it seriously,” Jessie said.
WA’s Road Safety Commissioner Adrian Warner was also impressed by Jessie’s campaign.
“It is so important to get young people’s perspectives on road safety issues like mobile phone distraction,” Mr Warner said.
“The billboard reminds drivers that nothing is more important in the world than getting safely to your destination.”
“Simple actions like turning off notifications, using the ‘do not disturb’ mode, and putting your mobile phone out of reach could save your life and risk of serious injury,” he said.
Jessie said she never really thought of the idea of a billboard campaign until she saw the ‘Look Up’ billboard campaign.
“I saw the ‘look up’ billboard and as a young person it is really the only one I paid attention to and it is so simple and I didn’t really know what it meant but it gave me a sense of peace,” she said.
“It put me back into reality and I wanted my campaign to have a resonating effect like that and as well as a road safety message.
“We live in a digital world but no one does need to have access to you and no one really needs you to respond to them.
“I thought what am I going to look at?
“I thought I don’t need to respond to that text message, the world can wait for me. It was part of a road safety message and a campaign.”
