The Free Press, Mankato

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Old habits die hard, unfortunately. Law enforcement has been noticing that more motorists across the state are picking up their phones again despite the new hands-free driving law.

An Eagan police officer recounted in a Star Tribune report how he recently watched a tanker driver rumbling down the road with his head down for a quarter of a mile, the driver never seeing the squad vehicle he’d passed by. During the traffic stop, the driver admitted to looking at his phone.

Minnesota Department of Public Safety numbers verify that more drivers have been cited in September than in August when the law took effect. In August 2,317 tickets were issued statewide for distracted driving, but in September that number climbed to 2,729, nearly an 18 percent increase.

So the awareness was fresh for a while, and now it appears many motorists are falling back into old habits of paying too much attention to their phones when they drive.

Many people have a Pavlovian response to phones dinging and buzzing when a notification occurs. Too many phone users feel compelled to check the screen right away. The message is most likely not of immediate importance. You can “like” someone’s vacation photo posting later. And if you have a sense that the message is urgent, pull off the road before messing with your phone.

The State Patrol emphasizes that some cellphone features are illegal to access even in a hands-free manner. Those include surfing the internet, streaming videos and using social media apps.

Too many examples exist of firsthand accounts of bad driving decisions. Paying more attention to driving has forever changed or ended too many lives already. Just ask the guy who did his online banking while driving, resulting in him hitting a mother on a bicycle pulling two children in a trailer. The children are now motherless, and that driver’s life, because of a split-second poor decision, also is forever changed.

Your phone needs to be in a dashboard holder — or maybe locked in the trunk so notifications won’t tempt drivers to automatically respond.

Whatever the method of making phones less of a priority, hands-free driving can’t be a passing phase if we want our roads to be as safe as possible.