Aggressive & Distracted Driving

Behaviours like tailgating, speeding, refusing to yield, and squeezing in front of another car too closely are all forms of aggressive driving. They can frustrate and anger the people around you, and that anger can boil over into a road-rage confrontation in which an enraged driver tries something dangerous to get even.

Tips to avoid becoming angry on the road:

• Recognize the signs of stress in yourself and ease them by taking in fresh air, breathing slowly and deeply, and putting on calming music
• Decide, before you set out, that you'll leave your personal problems behind once you're behind the wheel
• Break up any lengthy journey with a rest stop every couple of hours
• Resist the urge to compete with, or get back at, a driver whose behaviour strikes you as inconsiderate
• When another driver's habits irritate you, resist the temptation to "educate" them -- enforcing the rules is a job for the police
• Try not to take the errors or attitudes of other motorists as a personal affront
• Reserve your horn for situations that truly call for it; a brief, light tap normally does the job

Courteous, responsible driving makes it far less likely that you'll trigger a road-rage incident in the first place.

• Map out your route ahead of time -- a lost driver is behind some of the most erratic and thoughtless driving on the road
• Behave considerately and with courtesy toward those around you
• Give up the right-of-way when doing so is the polite thing to do
• Extend a little kindness by letting a signalling driver merge in front of you
• Slipped up at the wheel? Signal an apology -- acknowledging your error can sharply lower the odds of a confrontation
• Refuse to meet aggression with aggression -- don't make eye contact and don't gesture in return
• Steer clear of drivers who are behaving erratically

Among the most dangerous and reckless forms of aggressive driving is street racing. It reflects a complete indifference to everyone else using the road and exposes them all to a real danger of being hurt or killed. Anyone who street races faces possible charges under the Criminal Code of Canada.

An ever-larger share of injury and fatal collisions is being traced back to drowsiness behind the wheel. A fatigued driver can be just as impaired as one who has been drinking. Their reactions slow down and their alertness drops.

Research has found that drowsiness-related crashes cluster in two windows of the day:

• The late-night and early-morning stretch, roughly 2 a.m. through 6 a.m.
• The mid-to-late afternoon slump, in the 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. range

People who work shifts, those with sleep disorders that have gone undiagnosed or untreated, and drivers of commercial vehicles all face a higher risk.

Eight warning signs that your drowsiness has reached a dangerous level:

1. Your eyelids feel heavy and hard to hold open
2. Your head keeps dropping forward no matter how hard you try to stay focused
3. Your thoughts keep drifting and you struggle to concentrate
4. You find yourself yawning over and over
5. You've lost track of what happened over the last few kilometres
6. You're failing to notice traffic lights and signs
7. Your car wanders into an adjacent lane and you have to yank it back
8. You've slid off the road and only just avoided a crash

Every time you take the wheel, the task demands your complete focus -- and that holds true even when your car comes with driver-assistance technology. Ontario's distracted driving rules cover hand-held communication and entertainment gadgets along with certain display screens.

Once you're driving -- and that counts being stopped in traffic or waiting out a red light -- the law makes it ILLEGAL to:

• Text or dial on a phone or any other hand-held wireless communication device (the lone exception is calling 911 in an emergency)
• Operate a hand-held electronic entertainment gadget like a tablet or a portable game console
• Look at display screens that have nothing to do with driving, such as a video you're watching
• Set up a GPS unit by hand -- voice commands are the only permitted way

What you ARE permitted to do:

• Operate hands-free wireless gear through an earpiece, a lapel button, or Bluetooth
• Glance at GPS screens that are integrated into your dashboard or firmly mounted in place

Activities like reaching for objects, grooming, reading, eating, drinking, and smoking sit outside the scope of Ontario's distracted driving law. Even so, a careless or dangerous driving charge is still on the table whenever any kind of distraction puts other people at risk -- and that covers distractions from both hand-held and hands-free devices.

Dangerous driving is a Criminal Code offence, and it brings stiffer penalties, lengthy jail sentences among them.

Tips to avoid distracted driving:

• Power your phone down or set it to silent before you climb in, then tuck it into the glove box or a back-seat bag where you can't reach it
• Record a voicemail greeting before you head out that tells callers you're driving
• Lean on apps that block incoming calls and texts or fire off automatic replies
• Hand the job of taking a call or answering a text to one of your passengers
• If a reply truly can't wait, pull over somewhere safe before you deal with it
• Mute the notifications that nag you to glance at your phone

According to research, drivers aged 16 to 25 outpace every other age group when it comes to driving distracted, and they're also the group most likely to die or be hurt in a distracted driving crash.

• When you text or browse on your phone, your eyes leave the road and your chance of crashing climbs to 10 times the normal level
• One study found that drivers texting or switching music on their phones covered 28 metres more ground -- close to half a hockey rink -- before reacting to a hazard than drivers who stayed focused
• With each additional 10 years of driver age, the likelihood of texting dropped 44%, of using a handheld phone dropped 38%, and of using a hands-free phone dropped 28%