Texting and Driving Dangers Surpass Drunk Driving Risks

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) driving while distracted is six times more dangerous than driving with a blood alcohol level of .08 yet it is a continuing problem. In recent surveys “…more than eight in ten drivers believed it was completely unacceptable for a motorist to text or email behind the wheel, [yet] more than a third admitted to reading messages while driving, and more than a quarter reported sending them ….” Even though we know we shouldn’t be texting and driving, we still do it. A Virginia Tech study showed that although two seconds seems to be the safe amount of time a driver should look away from the road, texters… “tended to look away for as much as 4.6 seconds during a 6-second period. In effect, people lose track of time when texting.”[i]

Three times the crash risk

According to one study, “visual-manual tasks associated with hand-held phones and other portable devices increased the risk of getting into a crash by three times.” One in five young drivers who die in crashes, according to latest government statistics, was using a cell phone.

NHTSA’s voluntary guidelines released about a year ago ask carmakers to install interior devices that limit the time a driver’s eyes leave the road. The guidelines also recommend disabling several operations unless the vehicle is stopped and in park, such as:

• Manual text entry for the purposes of text messaging and internet browsing;
• Video-based entertainment and communications like video phoning or video conferencing;
• Display of certain types of text, including text messages, web pages, social media content.[ii]

As technology advances we struggle to keep up with such new gadgets as Google Glass and fully-integrated vehicles that will allow texting, calling, messaging and other interactions while driving.

A portion of this article was published by Highway to Justice in the Summer of 2014

 

 [i] Simons, Daniel J. and Christopher Chabris, “Is Google Glass Dangerous?”, The New York Times (May 24, 2014)

[ii] Id at iii.