Let’s face it, the nearly irresistible urge to text while driving is a really big problem. Almost all of us who text are tempted to keep doing it while we are behind the wheel. The facts are in, and it is a dangerous thing to do. It places you and everyone on the road around you in a lot of danger. It makes me wonder, how many people have died from texting while driving?
According to one website, Edgar, Snyder and Associates, a law firm specializing in representing injured people,there is a lot of hard evidence that cell phone use and texting played a big part in a lot of car crashes. They claim that “in 2007, driver distractions, such as using a cell phone or text messaging, contributed to nearly 1,000 crashes involving 16- and 17-year-old drivers”. That is statistics where only those in that age group were involved, and only those that admitted to or were specifically seen using their cell phone. These statistics don’t count 30 year olds, for instance, and almost all the 30 year olds I know think it is perfectly fine to text while driving.
Another statistic from that same site claimed that in 2008, “at any given moment, over 800,000 Americans were texting, making calls, or using a handheld cell phone while driving during the daytime”. That is a scary amount of distracted drivers. If you drive in North America, it seems pretty likely that you must be one of the culprits since it is so wide spread. What are you going to do about your behavior?
Apparently, between 2001 to 2007, an estimated 16,000 distracted drivers were killed in the U.S. because of texting or using a cell phone. The numbers sharply increased after 2005, as cell phone subscriptions rose. This sounds like a no brainer. People are dying, simply because they don’t have their mind on the road. I haven’t found the statistics for Alberta yet, but I am sure that distracted drivers in Alberta are just as much of a problem.Everyone needs to be proactive, not just with their teenage son and daughter, but with their own actions. I’ve texted behind the wheel. I have to stop. Right now. What are you going to do?
It’s a terrible statistics. I even couldn’t have imagined such figures. Texting while driving is terribly dangerous and should be prevented by any means.
Why people still texting while they are driving instead of stopping to the side of the road and text so that there are no accident or deaths happen. I hope people who text while driving will read this one so that they will realize how dangerous texting while driving. http://www.judithbassler.com/blog/texting-while-driving-can-lead-into-accident-or-death.html
This is a really sad trend, and to be honest, it’s only going to increase from here as cell phones become less expensive and more available to the general public. I don’t think the new trend of ‘BlueTooth’ will help much either as the situation is basically the same… People are more focused on their conversation than on the (un)conscious act of driving. When our car becomes our little personal ‘bubble’ and we cease to realize that other ‘bubbles’ contain actual REAL people, we tend to lose sight of our external world until tragedy delivers an inevitable wake-up call.
I could sympathize with what you say in your article and I thank you for writing these important things, prudence is never enough and it is right to talk about it also on the web!
But you know what I saw? In Italy and in Bologna, my city, have been removed from many roadside billboards depicting images that attracted too much attention to the driver so that he tried an accident, such as pictures of naked women, money, or offers services at low cost!
This unfortunately is another source of accident! We must spread this too!
Thanks & Regards
Giuseppe Bianchi
i think it is just plain stupidity to do texting while driving! i mean it’s so simple it is focus or die! some people just want to die i guess! no matter how important it is, it is now a reason to open and reply a text message while driving! it is like drinking a glass of water that you knew has a drop of poison!
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