Dangers: texting while driving effects of texting while driving

Texting While Driving? First, Choose Your Casket

The hardest cleanup calls are always the ones that involve children or teens. While automobile accidents have long claimed their share of young victims, today’s accidents are different. Most of them are completely preventable. They occur solely because of the distractions presented by the very thing that is supposed to make our lives easier and safer: technology.

Cell phones provide a level of safety we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago. Remember the days when, if our car broke down, if we ran out of gas, or if we had a flat tire, we had to leave our vehicle and walk alone or accept a ride from a stranger to get to a pay phone to call for help? We want our teen drivers to carry cell phones. If they have car trouble, if they’re running late, or if they get into any kind of trouble, they can make a call to you or to 911 without ever leaving the safety of their vehicle.

But our kids don’t use cell phones just for emergencies. They certainly don’t use them only when their car is safely stopped. And they don’t use them just to make phone calls. They use them to download music while they are driving and to look at social media while they are driving.

Statistically, the deadliest thing teens commonly do is use cell phones like mobile typewriters while their car is moving through traffic and traffic signals, around curves, down narrow, dark roads, and at high rates of speed on expressways.

Texting While Driving: The Cold Hard Facts

In 2011, about 23% of car wrecks, over a million accidents, involved cell phones.

In 2012, distractions accounted for 18% of all fatal crashes. (source: Federal Communications Commission)

To send a text while driving, your eyes are off the road and on the cell phone a minimum of five seconds. After taking your eyes off the road, an accident can occur, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 4.6 seconds.

Texting while driving makes a wreck 23 times more likely as opposed to the one-to-three times more likely when you punch in a phone number, talk or listen on a cell phone, or reach for a device.

1 out of every 4 car accidents in the US is caused by texting and driving. (source: Edgar Snyder & Associates – Cell Phone Use While Driving Statistics)

77% of teens claim they are confident that they can drive while texting and 55% claim texting while driving is easy.

Nearly half of all US high-school students age 16 or older text or email while driving. (source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Texting While Driving Stories

February 2014: While she was texting and driving, 45-year-old Belinda Hudspeth hit and killed a pedestrian in Belmont, North Carolina. Hudspeth was charged with second-degree murder.
September 2013: A 25-year-old Maryland woman admitted to texting while driving after she veered off the road, hit a tree, and drove 60 feet into a lake.
June 2013: 16-year-old Murphy Madison was texting while driving when he ran a red light and killed a 27-year-old mother of two in Anchorage, Alaska. Murphy was indicted on manslaughter and felony texting-while-driving.
October 2012: In Minnesota, Deianerah Logan died on her first day of her senior year in high school when she crashed into the back of a school bus while she was texting and driving. A 7-year-old child was exiting the bus when Logan’s car made impact.
April 2012: 20-year-old Liz Marks was reading a text from her mother while she was driving her Mazda 3 and crashed into a tow truck. She survived but was severely disfigured, blinded in one eye, and disabled in the accident.
January 2012: 21-year-old Chance Bothe’s truck careened off a bridge and into a ravine in Texas while he was texting “I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident.” He was critically injured, breaking nearly every bone in his body and sustaining a brain injury that left him unable to speak. “Don’t do it. It’s not worth losing your life,” Bothe said.
2010: Near Boise, Idaho, 31-year-old Ashley Zumbrunnen was paralyzed in a car accident after she texted her husband on her way to work. She crossed into oncoming traffic on a major highway, over-corrected, and lost control of the vehicle.

What Can You Do to Discourage Texting While Driving?

Talk to your teens. Make sure they know you are involved and monitoring their activity.
Lead by Example. Don’t use cell phones at all while you are driving.
Set rules, make them clear, and enforce them.
Stay informed about new technology that discourages and prevents teens from texting while driving and from performing other distracting activities while they’re driving.
Check your teen’s cell-phone or cell-phone records regularly.
Discuss with your teen the consequences of an accident that kills or injures another person because your teen was texting while driving.
Make sure your teen understands that he can’t hide dangerous activity. Phone records indisputably display whether or not someone was texting while driving.

We are Advanced Bio Treatment. We are here for you 24 hours every day of the year. Should you need our services, please call us at 800-295-1684, but not while you’re driving!