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The Statehouse News Bureau provides educational, comprehensive coverage of legislation, elections, issues and other activities surrounding the Statehouse to Ohio's public radio and television stations.

New Dashboard Tracks Distracted Driving Crashes In Ohio

[Ohio State Highway Patrol]

The Ohio State Highway Patrol says distracted driving is a big problem and to prove it, the agency is tracking those cases on a new public dashboard

It’s not just people using cell phones who are distracted. The patrol has documented accidents involving people tuning out while adjusting their radio or dealing with kids in the back seat, and the number of incidents continues to climb, Lt. Craig Cvetan said.  

“From 2016 to 2020, there were 195 fatal crashes that resulted in 212 deaths in Ohio alone that were related to distracted driving," he said.

But the patrol believes that number is low because officers often don’t know what people were doing before the crash happened. 

So far this year in Cuyahoga County, there have been 365 documented cases of distracted driving, 12 of which resulted in serious injury, according to the dashboard.

Across Ohio over the long Memorial Day weekend, distracted driving hit a high for the year so far with 357 citations issued between Friday and Monday.

The new distracted driving dashboard can be viewed at www.DistractedDrivingDashboard.ohio.gov.

Copyright 2021 The Statehouse News Bureau. To see more, visit The Statehouse News Bureau.

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