One of the more egregious exhibits of distracted driving I’ve ever witnessed involved a young woman with an itchy elbow.

The woman, driving in the lane beside me on a busy Bangor street, suddenly yanked her left arm from the steering wheel, her eyes from the road, and furiously scratched her elbow with her other hand for a while as her car continued going about 40 miles an hour in heavy traffic.

You really had to see it to believe it. I saw it and I still don’t quite believe it, and I can only hope her itch didn’t flare up again before she got to where she was going.

While that kind of erratic behavior might seem extreme, a new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says driving is fraught with such a variety of distractions these days that it’s taking a toll on our health. Driver inattention, according to the landmark report released Thursday, is the leading factor in most crashes and near-crashes in America today. Nearly 80 percent of crashes involve some form of distraction within three seconds before the accident. The study found that not only are drivers eating, drinking and grooming as they’ve done since cars were invented, the growth of on-board technology now allows us to check e-mail or send text messages while cruising down the highway, to get directions from our GPS systems, pop in CDs and tune in our favorite satellite radio stations.

“We see people on the roads talking on the phone, checking their stocks, checking scores, fussing with their MP3 players, reading e-mails, all while driving 40, 50, 60, 70 miles per hour and sometimes faster,” the NHTSA’s acting administrator told The Associated Press.

For more than a year, researchers used video and sensor devices to track 241 drivers in Washington, D.C. During the analysis period, which included nearly 2 million driven miles and some 43,300 hours of data, the drivers were involved in 82 crashes of various degrees of severity and more than 760 near-crashes. Researchers determined that drowsiness, which is significantly underreported in accident investigations, increased a driver’s risk of a crash or a near-crash by at least a factor of four. Reaching for a moving object increased the risk by nine times, while reading or applying makeup raised the stakes threefold. When drivers took long glances away from the road – elbow-scratchers, take notice – they were twice as likely to get into a crash.

The report found that the most common form of driver distraction was the cell phone, which isn’t too surprising. Last year, an NHTSA survey determined that 60 percent of cell phone use occurs while behind the wheel. What was interesting, however, was that the risks associated with dialing a phone were nearly identical to those linked with talking or listening on one. That adds weight to previous studies showing that the mental disconnect of a phone conversation while driving can actually blind motorists to traffic hazards right in front of them.

“This important research illustrates the potentially dire consequences that can occur while driving distracted or drowsy,” the NHTSA official said in the story, which told of a dedicated female musician who obviously was prepared to die for her art, and perhaps take a fellow motorist or two with her.

The woman, said the Virginia man who spotted her one day, was driving in traffic “with her knees up on the steering wheel, sheet music in her lap, and she was playing the flute.”