Texting While Driving - A Teen Killer
Texting While Driving - A Teen Killer
Using one you have to hold while driving makes you an accident waiting to happen. Now the scourge is texting while driving, and it's reaching epidemic proportions, especially among teenage drivers.
Automobile accidents top the list of killers for teenagers. Inexperience and inability to judge road conditions are big factors in many accidents involving teens, but distractions are equally dangerous. Anything that takes your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel can be deadly in a heartbeat.
Many young drivers are so used to texting all day every day that they assume they can keep up the behavior behind the wheel. Many do.
According to a 2007 national survey of 1,000 16- and 17-year-old drivers by AAA, 46 percent admit to texting while driving.
A study by Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) and Liberty Mutual Insurance Group showed that:
Text messaging is the largest distraction for teenagers while driving
Text messaging behind the wheel is as dangerous as driving drunk
37% of the 900 teenagers in the study sent and received text messages while driving, even though they found it "very distracting"
Some states are trying to address the problem, but it's tough for them to enforce laws against texting while driving. The most common result is that we learn about the effects of texting behind the wheel when we hear the sobering statistics about crashes.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that distracted drivers accounted for 80% of all crashes in the United States in 2005 and 2006. For teens, texting is the main distraction.
Where is this epidemic coming from? Primarily from two sources.
First, many teens text all day every day, and they carry the habit into the car. Their judgment about driving is understandably poor due to inexperience. The result is accidental death in many cases, but completely avoidable death if they were not texting...or talking on a cell, or fiddling with the radio.
Second, parents model the same kind of distracting driving behavior for their kids, and the kids naturally pick up on it. If you're a parent and your child sees you gabbing on your cell phone while drinking a cup of coffee as you merge onto the Interstate, do you think they'll magically learn not to drive while distracted somehow? Unlikely.
Laws against texting while driving might help, but they won't fix the problem. People still die because of cell phone distraction, and many states have laws against talking on a cell phone while driving (unless it's a hands-free phone).
Installing cell phone jamming technology in cars might help, but it's an expensive solution that ignores the real problem-learned irresponsibility.
The real solution is for parents to teach their kids how to drive without distractions. The roads are dangerous enough without adding things that take your attention off of the task at hand. When parents do the right thing, their kids will emulate them.
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