Personnel Updates for Nov. 1 to Nov. 14, 2019
November 25, 2019
Information provided by the Bureau of Budget and Business Systems
Information provided by the Bureau of Budget and Business Systems
Do you have a cell phone addiction you need to overcome?
According to Helpguide.org, “While you can experience impulse-control problems with a laptop or desktop computer, the size, and convenience of smartphones and tablets means that we can take them just about anywhere and gratify our compulsions at any time. In fact, most of us are rarely ever more than five feet from our smartphones. Like the use of drugs and alcohol, they can trigger the release of the brain chemical dopamine and alter your mood. You can also rapidly build up a tolerance so that it takes more and more time in front of these screens to derive the same pleasurable reward.”
Every day, about 30 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's one person every 48 minutes.
Slowly changing attitudes related to drunk driving have helped reduce these preventable deaths over the last few decades, but drivers who are drunk or high still cause more than 30 percent of the fatalities on both Iowa and our nation’s roadways.
Online insurance clearinghouse The Zebra conducted a small survey that begins to paint a picture of U.S. drivers' thoughts on drinking and driving.
Although many people don’t think of a department of transportation in this way, we are really a mobility company. Our jobs revolve around providing safe and reliable ways for people to get where they want to go. But there are a lot of facets to transportation that most people don’t even consider. Finding interesting ways to let people in on what we do and why we do it can be challenging.
Information provided by the Bureau of Budget and Business Systems
We’re all in this together. Everyone who is on the road, whether you’re in a passenger car, driving a big rig, or riding a bicycle, we all have to watch out for each other.
With Veterans Day, we honor our military heroes who understand the importance of banding together to go to battle. To muster simply means to gather forces together to fight a common enemy. For Zero Fatalities, that common enemy is traffic deaths.
So what can you do? The answer is simple. If every driver would simply follow five basic safety rules, we could vastly decrease the number of deaths on Iowa highways.
If you look at crash statistics in Iowa, the most active two weeks for vehicle/animal crashes began Nov. 2. Most of those animals are deer.
So far in 2019 in Iowa, there have been 4559 crashes with 23 serious injuries, 93 minor injuries and $19,663,506 in reported damage related to vehicle/animal collisions – and we’re just getting into peak season.
Officer Ryan Dahm from Iowa Motor Vehicle Enforcement recently participated in the 2019 North American Inspectors Championships held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance holds the North American Inspectors Championship (NAIC) to test, recognize, and award commercial motor vehicle inspector excellence. Each jurisdiction is invited to send an officer to compete against other top inspectors from jurisdictions all across North America. Dahm was chosen by his management team to represent Iowa. A total of 51 people participated.
Information provided by the Budget and Business Systems Bureau