While driving down the highway you go to answer a text. You take your eyes off the road for a few seconds and drift into oncoming traffic. You get in a head-on collision with an oncoming car and kill a man driving the car. Did you know the man that was killed had three children and his girlfriend in the car with him? Try saying you’re sorry to them.
Think before it’s too late.
Please put the phone down and just drive the car. The risk that you’re putting other drivers and yourself in is not worth a few minutes you don’t text your mom or girlfriend back. They can wait.
Texting while driving is one of the most dangerous things you can do. You have to completely take your eyes off of the road and type a message; this makes it 23 times more likely to get in an accident.
Is it really worth the risk? A compact car, like a 2013 Honda Civic, weighs 2815 pounds and has the capability of going 100 mph. Even if you are only going 55 mph, you travel the length of a football field in five seconds. Those five seconds are the minimal amount of time that your attention is taken away from the road when you text and drive.
With 82 percent of Americans ages 16-17 owning a cell phone, the temptation is there for new drivers. What is even more shocking is that 77 percent of young drivers are confident that they can safely text while driving. In addition, 55 percent say that it is easy to text and drive, but the facts show that 13 percent of drivers ages 18-20 who have been in an accident were either talking or texting on their cell phone at the time of the crash.
The increase in texting while driving could have something to do with young drivers identifying with their parents. Forty-eight percent of young drivers see their parents drive while talking on a cell phone; this has a direct correlation to young drivers talking on their phone with 52 percent of them doing so. This correlation can be backed by social learning theory, which states that people are susceptible to modeling concepts based off observations. Putting it simply, young adults can be learning these bad habits from their parents by seeing them texting or talking on the phone while driving.
In a society of constant contact and the need of constant stimuli, new drivers, as well as experienced drivers, will feel compelled to answer a text or phone call while driving.
With 23 percent or 1.3 million car crashes a year, involving cell phones, something needs to be done to prevent or limit people from texting while driving. A law needs to be passed nationwide so that people will associate texting while driving as a crime and there will be consequences if they do it. Only 39 out of 50 states passed laws to prohibit text messaging while driving.
There have already been steps in the right direction with television ads showing the dangers of texting while driving. They are powerful and portray real instances of events that have occurred because of people texting and driving. These are good to get the word out there and people can see what really happens. But more needs to be done to make people realize the dangers that they put themselves in every time they take their eyes off the road.
There are a few techniques to help parents monitor their children while they are driving. Some examples are a drive cam that provides real-time video, AT&T Drive Mode App for Android and teens and parents can take a text-free-driving pledge online at textinganddrivingsafety.com.
What can you do to better educate yourself on what to do and what not to do while driving.
Follow multiple anti-texting and driving awareness twitter accounts such as: @RayLaHood, @DistractionGov, @NHTSAgov, @DriveSafety.
You can also read blogs such as FromReidsDad.org, RookieDriver.wordpress.com,ctdrive.blogspot.com, EndDD.org.
