An obnoxious honk immediately brings your eyes back onto the road you were driving on when they abruptly widen as your vehicle is headed directly into oncoming traffic. Everything goes into slow motion as you try to break and swerve out of the way but you're too late. The details become blurred as you feel everything in your car fly forward and your body becomes numb. Screeching tires and screams from your children in the backseat are ringing in your ears while your nose fills with the smell of exhaust fumes and burning rubber. You become dizzy looking at the blur outside of your window as you burst into tears and scream. Your car flies sideways and instantly stops as it crashes into a telephone pole. Sirens are heard in the distance as you try to keep your eyes from closing. If only you had some sort of control over the situation.
Luckily, this wasn’t you, it was made up to prove the point that this scenario could have been prevented, easily. Where were the woman’s eyes when her focus was abruptly brought back to the road? Would it seem ridiculous to find out they were on her phone as she was texting her husband a funny story from her kids’ soccer practice? Laws are currently being passed to ban cell phone use while driving. As with any new law, some problems have been addressed. Some say it will be too difficult to enforce the law and some find it wrong to outlaw phones when we have plenty of other distracters when we’re driving that aren’t being banned. I believe that texting behind the wheel should be banned because studies have proven a higher accident rate when the driver is distracted, eliminating one major distraction is better than not eliminating any of the distractions, and it would be easy to enforce the law if we used our fast-growing technology and brought awareness to those who don’t know how dangerous it can be.
“Research has shown that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content” (Richtel A1). Virginia Tech conducted a “100-car naturalistic driving study” where they retrieved data from 100 individuals who volunteered to have specialized instrumentation installed into their cars for a 12-13 month period of time. The specialized instrumentation was discreet and it collected the data through 4 sensors, a machine vision-based lane tracker, GPS, accelerometers, glare and radio frequency detectors, and 5 channels of digital compressed video. It measured kinematic information and the vehicle’s state. The participants were not given any specific instructions by an experimenter they were simply told to drive around like they normally would. The data was collected and they discovered that 93% of rear-end striking crashes, 80% of all crashes and 65% of situations in which a rapid maneuver was used to just miss a crash were caused by the driver being distracted. This information made the study very interesting because it was previously estimated that only 25% of crashes were caused by a distracted driver. It was also noted that the use of a cell phone device was associated with the highest frequency for crashes (Box). Another study was conducted at Virgina State that involved putting video cameras inside the cabs of more than 100 long-haul trucks over a time period of 18 months and it also measured the time drivers took their eyes from the road to their phones. The data "found that when the drivers texted, their collision risk was 23 times as great as when they were not texting" and that in the moments right before a crash or a near-crash, "drivers typically spent nearly 5 seconds looking at their devices (which is) enough time at typical American highway speed limits to cover more than 400 feet" (Richtel). Even with this data that was collected from Virginia State, some state legislatures say they need more data to decide on whether or not they should pass the law to ban texting while driving (Richtel).
The Washington Post posted an article with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s facts on texting while driving. “The administration said that 5,870 people died and about 515,000 were injured last year in accidents attributed to distracted driving” (Halsey A03). You have to remember that these statistics are only on incidents where people admitted to or were proven to have been distracted right before the crash. The data collected could be lower and inaccurate because it’s hard to prove an accident was caused by a distraction, it’s not like there is a test for it, and it’s hard for people to admit they were at fault by not paying full attention to the road. Though they were accounting all distractions, the statistics they collected are extremely high and we should take any precaution we can to reduce the deaths and injuries. Even if the law is passed universally, like any law, not everybody is going to follow it. But the important factor is, there will be people who won’t want to pay the ticket and they’ll stop texting behind the wheel, which in turn could save their lives and the lives of others if they were to collide in an accident. There are already 14 American states that banned texting while driving while thirty-six don’t (Richtel).
There was a subway accident in Boston during the May of 2009 that brought back the issue of passing a law for banning texting while driving. One of the operators, who was 24-years-old, admitted that he was texting his girlfriend when the crash occurred. The subway collision injured him along with 49 of his passengers. The crash resulted in damages costing 9 million dollars and they were guessing with lawsuits by injured passengers would increase the cost of damages even more. The head of the agency banned all operators from having mobile devices on the subway trains (Hamblen).
Bringing awareness to individuals is a great way to show people how deadly texting behind the wheel can be and how easy it would be to avoid texting until they were no longer in their vehicles. Many groups such as celebrities, and insurance and cell phone companies have already started campaigns or brought the issue to the public’s awareness. AT&T’s “Txtng & Drivng….It Can Wait” campaign has the theme “No text is worth dying over” and they show victim’s last text message they received right before they died (Copeland). A story was told about a certain AT&T focus group campaign. One of AT&T’s focus group leaders said, “‘everybody pull out your phone. Pull up the very last text you had before you came in here. Are any of those texts worth dying for?’ The air came out of the room. It went absolutely silent” (Copeland). Hearing analogies like this one, or ones similar to it, will allow people to realize the seriousness of the consequences and that it’s not worth the risk.
Oprah Winfrey, who has been rated one of the most influential women in the world by Times Magazine, created an “End Distracted Driving campaign. Oprah tells audiences on her show stories of texting accidents hoping people will stop texting. The difference between many of her stories and regular stories in the paper is that she interviews people who have been dramatically affected by distracted-driving incidents. "It is my prayer that this show, this day will be a seminal day in your life," Oprah says. "Let it be the end, the end of you using a cell phone or sending a text message when you are behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. And until we as a nation decide we're going to change that, those numbers are only going to go up” (Winfrey).
9-year-old Erica before the tragic incident
The story that hit me the hardest was an emotional story told by a mother of three children. In November 2008, two days before Thanksgiving, she came home to emergency vehicles around her house and saw a child lyig on the street. Her husband said their 9-year-old daughter, Erica, had been riding her bike home from school and was about 30 seconds from being home safely when she was hit head-on by a 5,000-pount SUV. When she found out it was her daughter on the road she said she thought to herself, "Oh, she's unconscious. She's goinn to be ok...And they started cutting my daughter's clothes off and it was hitting me this is very, very, very serious." Erica passed away that night and her parents are now working hard to change Colorado laws. The mother states, "Get off the phone. Save a life. Don't talk and drive," she says. "You've got precious cargo in that car. Your life. Your children's life. They are not worth a phone call, a text, an e-mail. It's not worth it" (Winfrey).
Oprah has a web site titled the “No Phone Zone” that’s retrievable from her talk show site. Along with the stories that were told on her show she has a section where you can pledge to make your car a No Phone Zone to help put an end to distracted driving by committing to drive as responsible as you can. As of now there are 300,424 total pledge submissions. There is also an interactive map of the United States that allows you to click on states and see that state’s cell phone laws. Under the laws there is a link you can press to contact that state’s governor. Oprah is hoping this will make people involved in helping to pass the laws.
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company also supports a nation ban on texting while driving. Bill Windsor, Nationwide’s Safety Officer, stated, “there is a growing body of research and evidence that suggests a ban on texting while driving will save lives and make our roads a safer place to drive” (Gillespie). Nationwide focuses on enhancing technology that will help reduce texting while driving crashes. “Nationwide began working with Aegis Mobility on a new, cell-phone based technology that will have a positive impact on reducing TWD crashes by advising callers and texters that the individual they are trying to reach is driving” (Gillespie).
Some people have been arguing that banning distrations while driving would be possible to enforce. A writer from USA Today, George Runner, states, “…it’s next to impossible for law enforcement officers to prove a wreck was caused by a driver paying more attention to his hamburger than the road ahead” (Runner 8A). Runner argues that he understands there should be consequences for reckless driving, but he says, we should focus on current laws that already impose penalties for reckless driving. “Let’s keep the government out of people’s cars and allow the appropriate officials, such as law enforcement officers, to focus on keeping drivers safe” (Runner 8A). Others such as Trey Adams, an 18-year-old high school student who was interviewed in the Gadsden Times, stated, “If a law is passed, it’s not going to stop…People’s windows are tinted and you can’t see in. It’ll be hard to enforce” (Rogers). Las Vegas Metro Police Lt. Tom Roberts, believes there could be a problem with enforcement since there isn’t a training program for police officers to figure out whether people are texting or not. He also states, “The intent is to curb the instance of people while driving, and to educate tem. Our belief is that this bill would bring attention to the problem” (KoloTV). The truth is, with growing technology we can have a strong enforced law that people will start to obey. Every law is capable of being broken and every law is not always followed.
So far, Ohio does not have any laws banning texting or phone use while driving. However, I do know a girl who has been pulled over and questioned about texting. The officer took her phone and called the cell provider to ask if she just sent a message and when they confirmed she was, the officer gave her a ticket for I believe $50.00. When the girl told me this story I was shocked and realized that they could enforce the law. Being able to prove use of cell phones is the answer. Our fast growing technology is also key because we can discontinue the temptation to use our phones by not allowing any cell phone use (besides calling 911) while the car is turned on. If we could all agree and abolish our distracting phone habits while driving we could have saved the 5,870 people who died and the 515,000 who were injured last year. Is it worth it?
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