A bold-lettered “student driver” sign on a vehicle is enough to make many people perk up behind he wheel. Watch out, they think, you never know what they might do.

And it’s not that they’re wrong. Young drivers can be unpredictable and impulsive. This is all new to them, and it pays to exercise some caution in their proximity.

But the truth is that young drivers are far from the only people who are unsafe behind the wheel. A new study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that there’s plenty of blame to go around.

More than half of every age group of drivers have texted while driving, run a red light, or exceeded the speed limit in the past 30 days, according to the report. That’s important context because all too often people view road safety as an issue primarily for younger motorists.

That’s simply not true, according to the report — and the data is part of a dangerous trend on roads across the country. In 2015 traffic deaths increased 7 percent — the largest single-year increase in 50 years. And experts expect another rise in 2016 after all the data is collected.

And the problem isn’t reaching teen drivers with safety-focused messaging campaigns. When’s the last time your local school district went through prom season without at least one mock accident event?

The broader issue is how to reach adult drivers with safety reminders and modify their behavior. Because even when drivers say something’s unacceptable to do, many of them still do it according to the report.

For example, more than 75 percent of drivers told AAA researchers that it was unacceptable to text or e-mail while driving, but 31 percent said they’d done so in the last month. Ninety-six percent said drowsy drivers are a serious threat — yet 29 percent said they had recently driven while being so tired that they had trouble keeping their eyes open.

At the same time, nobody thinks they’re part of the problem. Eighty-three percent of drivers told researchers that they were more careful than other drivers on the road.

That’s the climate which Pennsylvania legislators are trying to push back against when they discuss or approve measures like traffic cameras in highway work zones, or allowing municipal police departments to use radar guns for speed enforcement.

Opponents are fond of demonizing the efforts as being all about money. And there’s no doubt that in other places at other times abuses have occurred. But that doesn’t make it a certainty those things will happen here.

Is it so hard to believe that there’s also a public safety component at work here? More than 35,000 people were killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2015. Every single one of those deaths is preventable.

Doing nothing to reverse this deadly trend shouldn’t be an option.