by Arielle Young
Did you know that texting on an electronic device while operating a motor vehicle may distract you, therefore increasing the risk for an accident? Duh, of course you did. Doing practically anything else besides focusing on the road... talking over the phone, eating, changing music, conversing with passengers, or even one's mind being elsewhere... decreases the amount of control a driver has when behind the wheel. Again, duh. What you may not know yet is just how much texting can affect the odds of an car accident: 23-fold increase.
Texting while driving is right up there with doing your makeup while driving.
What this means exactly is that, after a Virginia Tech study using highway cameras to observe drivers and truckers for over six million miles, these people were 23 times more likely at risk for a collision. Now, put that back-to-back with other knowingly-risky distractions drivers are constantly guilty of, such as motorists failing to keep their eyes forward while speaking or listening to another over the phone while driving. These risks are significantly lower than that of texting. In fact, even dialing a seven-digit phone number supposedly increases the collision risk by six times.
It's a little easier to see from the physical perspective- common incidents that occurred before an accident happened after nearly five seconds texting on an electronic device. In a car driving at 55 mph on the highway, a driver has already covered the length of a standard football field. Whoops!
The key to a risky stretch of road? Keeping your eyes anywhere but the road. Even for a couple of seconds, a driver will slip into a false sense of muscle memory instead of relying primarily on their vision, which is extremely deceiving. Fourteen states have already banned texting, and some are trying to ban all cellphone use for teenage drivers. Maybe it's not such a bad idea.
It's obvious that texting on the road is dangerous, but the statistics make this Duh Study a bit more shocking.
What do you think - should cell phone use and texting while driving be banned?
via CNN
