North Texas Council Of Governments Launches Safe Driving Campaign

ARLINGTON, Texas (CBSNEWS.COM) - The North Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) is launching an effort to promote safe driving across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Drive Aware North Texas is an educational campaign designed to improve unsafe driving behaviors that are the leading contributing factors for serious injury and fatality crashes in North Texas.

NCTCOG officials say these leading factors are speeding, impaired driving, failing to drive in a single lane, and distracted driving.

Speeding contributes to one-third of such accidents alone and was identified as a factor in over 150,000 crashes, including 1,252 fatal injury crashes and 4,619 suspected serious-injury crashes, from 2016 to 2020.

The other three factors account for an additional 31% of crashes.

Alcohol is the leading cause in impaired driving accidents, which have slowly declined since 2016.

The largest contributor to distracted driving accidents was smartphone use while driving. Between 2016 and 2020, there were over 77,000 distracted driving accidents recorded in North Texas.

Wrong-way driving incidents occur less frequently, but when they happen, they are more likely to result in serious injuries or fatalities than the other factors.

The Drive Aware North Texas website focuses on these four main factors and includes data from the past five years in easy-to-read graphs.

NCTCOG hopes that the campaign will educate North Texans ways to make driving safer for themselves and others.