Texting While Driving
It is commonly assumed that teens are the main cause for the texting while driving epidemic in America. Since teens are usually glued to their phones and are new drivers, they must be prone to be more reckless, right?
A new survey funded by AT&T found that adults actually text-while-driving more than teens. The study was taken from a group of about 1,000 consumers. The survey showed that nearly half of all adults’ are texting while driving and only about 43 percent of teen’s are texting while driving. A total of 9 percent of adults admitted that they knew that is was wrong, but continued to do it anyways. The astonishing factor is that there are 180 million adults drivers compared to 10 million teen drivers, and over half of them are texting while driving.
The campaign AT&T created called “It Can Wait” included the survey and commercials that share traumatic and heart wrenching stories of young adults and teens that have been injured, disabled, or lost a loved one due to texting while driving. The Center for Disease Control shared that an average of nine people die from texting related incidents every day with over 1,000 injured in texting accidents as well.
The more technology advancements there are the more distractions there can be behind the wheel. Web browsing, texting, and reading your phone use almost all of your thinking and viewing abilities, making the risk of an accident double if not triple.
Teens learn by example, and if their parents tell them not to text while driving yet do it themselves, it makes it very difficult for a teen to want to heed instruction. Please just wait to send your message or make your search. It is easy to assume that you can multi-task while driving, but it is not worth someone’s life.
Source: Tech Crunch, “Adults Text While Driving More Than Teens, Says Survey,” Jordan Crook, March 28, 2013.