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A new report by Wards Intelligence provides some very interesting data on truck accidents, and tries to get below the surface to understand the reasons why such accidents are trending upward. Wards’ 2018 Commercial Vehicle Safety Report, “Who, Where & Why of Truck Safety Performance,” takes great pains to find the most up-to-date public and proprietary data sources to try to form a picture of the factors that caused truck-accident related fatalities to continue to increase after briefly decreasing in 2016.

The advances made in our current age of technology are undeniably game changers. Communication, no matter how near or far, is literally at our fingertips. We can get immediate answers to questions, dictate texts and emails and tell our phones to call someone on demand,  all while keeping our social networks updated  in the time it takes to walk into the next room. These advances are conveniences our predecessors would have thought of as science fiction; but these—like all new realities—come with their own set of challenges.

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month. A designation created in large part to our technological strides in communication. As far as we’ve come in bringing the future of communication to our front doors, we’ve also taken a big step backwards when the actions we take on our devices while behind the wheel are proven to increase crash risk.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently released a new two-year “Most Wanted” wish list for 2017-18 that puts distractions and tired driving at the top of ten pressing safety issues to improve.

NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said that the list's new two-year cycle will “help to focus our advocacy efforts on sustained progress. We will take stock at the one-year mark, note what progress has been made, and decide what additional improvements are needed.”

Keep your eyes on the prize. That’s easier said than done—especially when driving—even when that prize is your very life. Recent research indicates that some type of distraction is present during 52 percent of normal driving—and distracted driving can be nearly as dangerous as driving drunk.

In a new three-year, nation-wide, naturalistic driving study involving 3,500 participants, researchers report that the risk of having a crash involving injury or property damage doubles when distracted. In fact, 68 percent of crashes involved a distraction of some kind. And an estimated 36 percent of all motor vehicle crashes could be avoided if distractions were out of the picture.