CHP: 55,000 distracted driving tickets issued in April

More than 55,000 drivers were ticketed for using handheld cellphones to talk or text during April’s Distracted Driving Awareness Month enforcement crackdown, the California Highway Patrol said.

Citations were written by officers from 130 CHP officers and nearly 230 local law enforcement agencies throughout the state.

Still, that was a five percent drop from the same enforcement period in 2013.

The April total was, however, higher than the average month, when about 33,000 cellphone violation tickets are written.

The office of Traffic Safety said the percentage of drivers actively using cellphones — handheld or hands-free — at any one time across the state dropped to its lowest point since counting began in 2011. It dropped from 7.4 percent in 2013 to 6.6 percent in 2014.

Bucking the downward trend of cellphone violations were those handed out in April for other types of distracted driving – eating, grooming, reading, or other distracting behaviors. The number of citations for those violations more than doubled to over 7,000, CHP officials said.