“Usually they get in the middle lane and roll slowly, zigzagging”

According to a recent study by the Société des Autoroutes du Nord et de l’Est de France (Sanef), 73% of teleworkers use their phones while driving and 10% of regular teleworkers sometimes participate in a videoconference while driving. The company therefore launched a radio advertising campaign and set up prevention messages on light panels to encourage drivers not to take their smartphones while driving.

Answering calls, emails, texts or being on a video conference while driving is what Milan, 22, admits to doing quite often. The pressure of his work and his bosses regularly pushes him to adopt dangerous gestures, he says. “Sometimes I have to call my clients for important messages, or when the boss calls, we have to pick up the phone.”, he justifies himself. Julie has just come home from work, and stops in a rest area to make a phone call. She remembers a videoconference meeting, with one of the participants slightly distracted. “The person was behind the wheel, he was also our manager, so it wasn’t necessarily up to us to tell him what to do”, she explains.

Drivers with phones in hand, Laurent Barzac, patroller for Sanef for more than 30 years, now has dozens of them every day. Behaviors that it detects at a glance: “Usually they get in the middle lane, they drive slowly, zigzagging. And when you pass them, you see they’re on the phone.”

Laurent travels the highways with his truck to ensure the safety of users. A few minutes after the start of his tour, he notices a reckless first. “We can see it, it is straddling two lanes, it does not put a flashing light. It is enough that in front of that brakes and it can be catastrophic”, he warns. Then the patroller tries to warn the driver of his bad behavior. “Sometimes we overtake them by giving a little blow of the horn to try to make them understand”, he recounts.

“Sometimes, some hide their phone. We will sometimes have a middle finger. It is for their safety, but they say to themselves: ‘we do what we want'”.

Laurent Barzac, motorway patroller

to franceinfo

Jean-Paul, truck driver for twenty years, says he is exasperated by these employees who telework on the road: “If people are dumb enough to take visios when they’re driving, if they don’t realize what’s going on on the roads to do things like that, at some point … education.” Using your phone while driving triples the risk of an accident. But it can also be expensive in the event of a traffic check. Count 135 euros fine and three points less on the driving license. a license which will be automatically retained if you combine using the telephone while driving with another offense.