Seriously, how scary has this texting-while-driving thing become?
You know that we’ve literally got a deadly serious problem with texting while driving when stories like this emerge:
- Cops see motorist “wrist driving” while holding a phone in each hand
- Cars driven by texting drivers end up in trees
- People are locked in on YouTube videos when behind the wheel
- The practice of bowing down to examine a smartphone when stopped at an intersection is so common that it has been termed “red-light prayer” by police officers
Here are a couple of numbers: 2,845 and 31,492.
And here’s a bit of data to flesh them out: Reportedly, the first entry spells the number of times that California drivers received traffic citations for texting in 2009, with the second designation relating to the same subject matter in 2015.
That’s right: Behind-the-wheel texting convictions went up by more than 1,000 % in California in a six-year period.
Is that not alarming to an almost incalculable extent?
And here’s something else: The status quo — the current reality, if you will — is likely even more dismal in many other states, given that California has issued some comparatively harsh laws regarding phone bans while driving.
What — if anything — can stop what is clearly an epidemic wreaking catastrophic consequences on state and national roadways? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that behind-the-wheel distractions yielded nearly 3,500 fatalities in the United States (and including Puerto Rico) during 2014.
Harvard’s School of Public Health is currently working on a national media campaign that its architects hope will change driving attitudes and greatly curb motorists’ texting.
At least that is something. The same group of Harvard researchers was intimately involved with the successful initiative from the 1980s that resulted in a material curbing of drunk driving-related deaths through an increased public acceptance of designated drivers.
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