The Road Safety Roundtable, hosted on April 27th, featured road safety experts from across the U.S., including:

• Emily Stein, President of the Safe Roads Alliance
• Jay Winsten, Director at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
• Joel Feldman, President of EndDD.org
• Tom Robbins, Founder & President of the Energize for Safety Coalition
• Linda Terrell, Director of the Oklahoma Challenge

The group reviewed four active U.S. campaigns promoting awareness of phone distraction and working on ways to change drivers’ behaviors.

The Oklahoma Challenge took off when Terrell and Robbins brainstormed creative ways to help newly licensed teens drive safer by using the Safest Driver App and incentivizing participation with Amazon gift cards. They teamed up with the state officers and promoted the contest to two hundred and fifteen schools, and shared all safe driving resources and information on social media and their website. The contest produced overwhelmingly positive results: even the bottom 25% of participants improved their driving behavior.

Robbins’ Energize for Safety is a nonprofit coalition of community leaders, energy providers, and safety supporters who are committed to positively impacting driver safety in communities where we work, play, and live. It’s the first time in the state of Oklahoma that an effort has been made to bring together organizations like CMT and the community to figure out how we can tackle the distracted driving issue.

Winsten, whose research has targeted ways in which social communications and pop culture can affect communal change concurs, stating that a comprehensive approach is the only way to make progress on the distracted driving problem. It’s going to take auto manufacturers implementing technologies such as the CMT’s; it’s going to take tougher laws and regulations; it’s going to take rebranding distracted driving to the same level of offense as drunk driving. The distracted driving issue needs to be taken as an important social problem. 

Watch the recorded version of the webinar to learn more about these active road safety campaigns that are combating the distracted driving issue from the ground up. 

—

Over the next few months, we will be featuring CMT’s outstanding women in leadership positions from within CMT, and among our partners. Our first installment of the series, So You Want to Work in STEM, will be on May 4th, from 11:00-11:45 AM EDT. CMT’s Sharon Gadonniex, VP of Engineering, and Lakshmi Shalini, VP of Risk & Insurance Analytics will meet for a 45-minute roundtable discussion about how to equip, enable, and empower women in their STEM careers. If you have not done so yet, register here.