txting + drving = bad idea

Though I’ve never driven while intoxicated, I am guilty of something nearly as dangerous: driving while intexticated.

These days, nearly everyone owns a cell phone, and texting has become a nationwide – if not international – phenomenon. But this phenomenon has recently fallen under strict scrutiny because of its relation to the number of accidents caused by texting while driving, an act appropriately termed “driving while intexticated.”

According to a study released this summer, people who text while driving are 23 times more likely to be involved in an accident than those who refrain from texting while driving.

This same study, one of the first to focus on the effects of texting while driving, also showed that when texting, people spend an average of nearly five seconds not focusing on the road. Though five seconds may not seem like much, for someone driving 55 mph – an average highway speed – that five seconds equals driving the length of a football field.

Pretty scary, when you consider the number of people you know who text while driving. Even scarier when you think about the people you don’t know who, at any given moment, are driving the same streets you are but paying more attention to whatever their last text said than on the road.

Currently, only 19 states have outlawed texting while driving. This July, legislation was introduced in the Senate that would establish a federal law requiring each state to prohibit texting while driving, but it has yet to gain firm support from either party.

My question, simply put, is this: How many lives have to be lost before lawmakers decide this issue warrants serious attention and a law making it illegal to text while driving?

We’ve all heard horror stories about the dangers of being distracted behind the wheel. In 2007, five teenage girls from New York died after the driver of their vehicle swerved into oncoming traffic and hit a tractor-trailer. The vehicle then burst into flames, leaving the girls trapped inside with no chance of survival.

Police records indicated that the driver, Bailey Goodman, had been texting on her phone up to 75 seconds before the accident. Though no one will ever be able to confirm that Bailey had been the one actually texting, this unfortunate accident is just one of many that proves the dangerous and all too often life-threatening mistake made when people text and drive.

Most people in America heed these accidents as warnings and believe in the severity of texting while driving. In a recent survey, 95 percent of drivers said that texting while driving was “completely or somewhat unacceptable.”

However, 18 percent of these same people admitted to having texted while driving in the past month.

Until Congress passes a law prohibiting people from texting while driving, people on the roads will have to continue to worry that the person in the next car is more concerned with reading their last text message than with driving carefully and cautiously.

I used to drive while intexticated, but I’ve reformed. I hope the rest of the nation does, too.