In the US, every year 400 fatal crashes occur because of texting and driving. It is an unspeakable tragedy that these people perish because of human action. Hundreds of people are lost, hundreds of families are left with a wound that will never fully heal. It is an unspeakable tragedy. If they knew that they were going to die from their actions, would they have been more careful? Would they have made different choices? I would say that they almost certainly would have. This is where driver education programs come in. If we make people aware of the potential consequences, and discuss it plainly, we can save so many lives. Everybody wants to come home at the end of the day, nobody wants to leave their family grieving for them, nobody wants to have to live with having killed someone because of their own actions. Nothing is more important than being safe while driving, cell phone notifications can wait until you’re parked. If you text while driving, you are twenty times more likely to crash versus focusing on driving. It acts to slow your reaction times by as much as four alcoholic drinks in only one hour. If people realize that texting and driving is as bad as driving drunk, and if we demonize it like we demonize drunk driving, so many deaths will be prevented. Teens who text and drive spend one-tenth of their time outside of their lane, and one-quarter of teens text while driving. 10% of parents text while driving, and that’s a serious portion of the population.
In the 80s, campaigns to include seatbelts in cars and encourage the wearing of seatbelts have resulted in a society where most people wear their seatbelts unthinkingly, automatically putting them on, and that’s saved 374,276 lives since 1975. That number of lives saved is impossible to comprehend. It’s about as many people as currently live in Cleveland, Ohio. A major city’s worth of people is an obscene number of lives that were saved by one simple action. Imagine how many more can be saved by asking people to stop just one action. At 2800 a year it could be the difference of 159,000 more lives over the same time period as seatbelts, or enough to more than fill the largest football stadium. That is an ideal worth fighting for.
When I see my friends texting while driving, I tell them that they could get themselves severely injured or killed, that they could leave their families wondering why they prioritized texting over their safety. Most people are willing to change if they only understand, but 35% of teens admit to having texted while driving, and that’s a terrifying statistic. 94% claim to understand the danger, but if we seriously explain the danger, and don’t shy away from saying that people die and are horribly injured and impacted for the rest of their lives, maybe people would stop. ¼ of teens text every time they drive, meaning that ¼ of teens are effectively as impaired as a drunk driver. Teens need to be taught about the dangers in a serious way, without avoiding discussing the real-world consequences, because it’s the only way people will learn.
To be a safer driver, I keep my phone out of sight and on silent. Nothing that is on my phone is more important than the safety of myself and those around me. I take care to not drive tired, and to drive defensively. I turn off the radio when it becomes a distraction, and I do not eat in the car. Nothing is more important than keeping my eyes on the road. Everyone deserves to go home at the end of the day, and I want to make sure I’m not the cause of someone being hurt or killed, and I think that on some level so does everyone else, if they only know how.
It is my sincere hope that in ten years texting while driving will be treated like drunk driving is now. We need to take serious precautions and preventative measures to help save lives. People need to understand that a text is never as important as the potential harm they could cause. If you are someone who texts while driving, stopping is the single biggest way you can prevent harming others. You don’t want to leave your family without you, or someone else’s without them. We are all something to somebody, whether that’s a child, a parent, a spouse. Think of them, and stop texting for their sake.