Imagine the last text you sent was the reason someone didn’t make it home. Maybe it was important you told a friend you were on the way. Maybe a song needed to be switched before Mom in the passenger seat heard it swear. Maybe you needed to pull up Google Maps before making a wrong turn. Maybe it wasn’t worth looking up and realizing it wasn’t as important as you thought it was. Distracted driving is becoming significantly more common, and so is the number of crashes that happen as a result. However, there are several ways to avoid crashes, including educating drivers, targeted law enforcement, and even making changes to phones themselves. But is distracted driving really that dangerous?
According to Christy Bieber in article, “Distracted Driving Statistics & Facts In 2024” she shares, “Each year, approximately 3,000 people lose their lives to car accidents resulting from distracted drivers. This accounts for between 8% and 9% of all fatal motor vehicle collisions on roads across the United States.”  While this percentage might not be as high as casualties caused by impaired driving, I strongly believe that any effort towards safer driving can make a massive difference, even if it is just for one life. In many cases, this starts by educating the drivers themselves. Driver Education classes can be improved through more in vehicle driving practice, because while educating in a classroom is crucial to learning to drive, no lecture can teach you how to make the split-second decision to slam on the brakes. Much of my learning came from using my Driver Education lessons to know what different signs and lanes meant, but it was only out on the road that I learned how to follow them safely.
Distracted drivers are easy to spot. They swerve lanes, ignore signaling, and usually drift over the speed limit. Or, in the case of the person driving next to me on the freeway, are practicing driving with their knees as they eat a large Café Rio burrito. Smart driving can be better enforced by upping fines, increasing police surveillance for teenagers, putting out PSA, and keeping better track of the 16 and 6 law. In my case, I felt as if I was the only one who followed the 16 and 6 rule. My friends drove each other to the school and the store all the time – they had their license - but that didn’t mean they knew how to drive focused. A particularly close friend of mine rear ended another driver as a result of texting while driving, and I strongly believe this to be correlated with negative habits that were built when learning to drive. Having increased police awareness can help break these habits when they start.
I learned how to drive my sophomore year of High School. Don’t mistake this for an effortless with sunglasses look, because it looked more like Dad-has-his-hand-on-the-emergency-brake driving. It was my third time out when I started teaching myself how to use Google Maps. I got distracted trying to read the directions, and we got on the freeway by accident. This incident demonstrates the distracting influence of phones, even if the initial purpose might be to help. As a result, I believe that working towards apps that offer a driving mode, hands free music control, clearly defined maps, and silence features are likely to cut the time drivers are looking away from the road by significant strides. For texting, however different measures need to be taken. According to Science Alert, “"The reaction time of drivers participating in either a hand-held or hands-free conversation was more than 40 percent longer than those not using a phone. This came out to 1 extra second than those with phones – equating to around 11 meters for a car travelling at 1 kilometer an hour.” I suggest communication apps that are able to silence notifications and send an automated text message becoming more available to combat this.
Is the last text you sent worth someone else’s life? It is important to let people know where you are, to skip the sad song in your jam out playlist, and to use map services to find directions. It is not, however, important to do that while driving. All the previous circumstances can wait until you are not behind the wheel. Distracted driving crashes are dangerous, expensive, and completely avoidable. It includes educating drivers, targeting law enforcement, and making positive changes to phones. Don’t wait until you have to snap back to a reality without a backspace button.