Sophomore Lauren Ritchie didn’t expect to be hit from behind, but it happened almost instantly. While stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, she was rear-ended. The cause? A text message that had distracted the driver behind her.
“He was texting and I was in stopped traffic, and I guess he just looked up and realized that he was too close to me to stop, and he just slammed into the back of me,” Ritchie said.
Text messaging while driving has drawn the attention of many studies recently. The number of people sending text messages is increasing, as are the numbers of car accidents caused by texting while driving. And, despite the slew of new laws and deadly accidents reported in the media, people continue to do it.
About 800 billion text messages were sent last year – four times the number sent in 2006. As a result, police officers are seeing more accidents.
State trooper Robert Brown of the Texas Department of Public Safety said of the 13 car accidents he dealt with in October, five were cell-phone related.
A 2008 Nationwide Insurance phone survey found that 18 percent of people send or read text messages while driving. However, this number is an astonishing 40 percent in people under the age of 30.
Legal measures have been taken in an effort to reduce these numbers. Washington, D.C. and 18 states have passed laws banning texting while driving a vehicle. Nine of these states, including Texas, have passed this ban for minors only.
Utah passed a law that imposes a 15-year prison sentence on anyone who either injures or kills someone as a result of text messaging while driving.
This past summer, four U.S. senators introduced the ALERT Drivers Act of 2009, which would require states to ban the sending of text messages or e-mails by drivers or they will lose 25 percent of their highway funds.
Texas, however, still has no current laws to prevent a driver over the age of 18 from using a phone while driving unless he or she is in a school zone. Brown says he will often blow his air horn to get the driver’s attention. However, he says that legally there is nothing he can do to punish a driver for texting, even if the driver causes an accident as a result.
“It’s a factor on a crash report, but we can’t cite you for it,” Brown said.
This is surprising, given the fact that studies have shown looking down at a phone for 4.6 seconds while driving 55 miles per hour is the equivalent of covering a football field.
A driver distracted by text messaging is also 23 times more likely to have an accident, according to a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study.
What’s even scarier is that sending text messages while driving has been compared to driving drunk in a number of studies. Employees for Car and Driver Magazine conducted an experiment to test this theory.
The results? Texting while driving is in fact up to twice as dangerous as driving while intoxicated.
University Park traffic officer A.R. Rosales said he has witnessed many instances in which a car is swerving in and out of lanes, thinking he is dealing with a drunk driver; he pulls them over only to have them say they were simply text messaging.
It is no minor distraction, even though most states still have no law against it. Rosales is a witness to the real dangers of text messaging behind the wheel.
“One of the major accidents that we had I think last year was where a person actually died. Whenever we arrived, he was pretty banged up to where he couldn’t respond,” Rosales said. “The phone started ringing, and the officer picked up the phone and saw that there had been some text messages sent during the time period right before the accident, and he didn’t respond to the last one, so we knew text messaging had been involved.”
So despite all of the gruesome facts surfacing about this distracting activity, why do people still continue to do it? Rosales said many people don’t realize the divided attention aspect of texting while driving, and think that they can handle both tasks at once.
Sophomore Alex Ehmke, who is currently pursuing four majors and two minors, is one of the many drivers who attempts to multi-task in his car.
“Because I’m a pretty good driver, I feel like I can multi task and still be a more attendant driver than most other people on the road,” Ehmke said.
Because people believe they can still drive with their attention divided, they don’t consider that what they are doing could lead to a disastrous outcome.
“You have to focus on what’s ahead of you, especially when you drive. Focus on the road. That’s not one of those areas where you need to multi-task,” Brown said.
