• Num­bers Tell Their Own Stories
• Hands-held vs. Hands-free
• Stud­ies That Prove Dan­gers of Dis­tracted Driving
• Pro­grams That Rid of Poten­tial Tex­ting Dangers
• Life-Changing Deci­sions
• Works Cited

Is a Text Really Worth Dying For?

It was a warm, antic­i­pated sum­mer night for 21 year-olds, Bri­anna and Kim They were on their way to a party in Fair­lawn, but didn’t expect to never arrive.

Bri­anna was dri­ving along Route 4 in New Jer­sey with Kim in the pas­sen­ger seat while quickly tex­ting the host of the party to ask for direc­tions. Before Bri­anna was able to real­ize that a pick-up truck from the other side of the high­way attempted to make an ille­gal U-turn into her lane, she T-boned the car, killing her­self and eject­ing Kim about 25 feet.

Over the past decade, dri­ving while tex­ting (DWT) has evolved from a pro­gress­ing prob­lem into a fatal issue. Although DWT is banned in 23 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia thus far includ­ing New Jer­sey, it is still a com­mon daily activ­ity that claims the lives of thou­sands of peo­ple each year. Since it hasn’t secured its own place on crash reports yet and usu­ally isn’t reported as the rea­son­ing for acci­dents, it gen­er­ally falls under the cat­e­gory of dis­tracted driving.

Dis­tracted dri­ving is any non-driving activ­ity a per­son engages in that increases the risk of crash­ing. Activ­i­ties such as talk­ing and/or tex­ting on the phone, eat­ing or drink­ing and read­ing are included within this def­i­n­i­tion, but stud­ies are show­ing that tex­ting while dri­ving poses the great­est threat.

Accord­ing to the National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion (NHTSA), there are three dif­fer­ent types of dis­trac­tion that can occur while dri­ving: visual, man­ual and cog­ni­tive. Visual dis­trac­tion is when you take your eyes off of the road, man­ual dis­trac­tion is when you phys­i­cally remove your hands from the wheel and cog­ni­tive dis­trac­tion is when you’re men­tally focus­ing on other things rather than dri­ving. Cog­ni­tively speak­ing, dri­ving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activ­ity asso­ci­ated with dri­ving by 37 percent.

DWT encom­passes all three types of dis­trac­tion at the same time, which is why it poses such a large problem.

Along with dis­tract­ing dri­ving, tex­ting also presents com­mu­ni­ca­tion issues in today’s soci­ety. With the new tex­ting era, youths are essen­tially los­ing their abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate. Since DWT sig­nif­i­cantly impacts the younger gen­er­a­tion, preva­lently ages 15–20 where dis­trac­tion is the num­ber one cause of teen dri­vers’ crashes, these youths are grow­ing up with­out the “essen­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills,” accord­ing to Direc­tor of the New Jer­sey Divi­sion of High­way Traf­fic Safety, Pam Fis­cher.

“Not only is this a prob­lem from a pub­lic safety stand­point, but also from a soci­etal stand­point,” Fis­cher said. “We’re los­ing the abil­ity to truly com­mu­ni­cate. You know, it’s an art form to have a con­ver­sa­tion, and it’s scary to think that we’re los­ing the abil­ity to do so.”

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Num­bers Tell Their Own Stories

Car acci­dents still remain the lead­ing cause of death for 15–20 year-olds From 1997 through 2006, more than 63,000 youths ages 15–20 died in car acci­dents. This panned out to be about 122 teenagers each week.

Although all of these acci­dents weren’t a direct result of dis­tracted dri­ving, a new study con­ducted by the Insur­ance Insti­tute for High­way Safety (IIHS) in 2008 proved that cell phone usage was aid­ing in the increas­ing num­bers of deaths on the road. The Insti­tute sur­veyed 1,219 dri­vers 18 and older dur­ing the last two months of 2009. Among the dri­vers who admit­ted to cell phone use, the study found that cell phone use while dri­ving could account for twenty two per­cent of all crashes, or about 1.3 mil­lion in 2008.

In 2008 alone, over 37,000 peo­ple were killed in car acci­dents; of those dri­vers, about 5,500, or roughly eleven per­cent, were killed as a result of dis­trac­tion, accord­ing to NHTSA. Dri­vers 20 and under were found to be the age group with the largest pro­por­tion of dis­tracted dri­vers account­ing for 16 per­cent of all fatal crashes involv­ing dis­trac­tion. This num­ber steadily increased from 12 per­cent in 2004.

This act of dis­trac­tion also accounted for over half of a mil­lion injuries in acci­dents. The num­ber of peo­ple injured accounted for twenty-two per­cent of all peo­ple injured in motor vehi­cle acci­dents that year.

Aside from deaths and injuries involv­ing dis­tracted dri­ving, NHTSA’s research also dis­plays that teen dri­vers engage in cell phone use tasks more fre­quently than adults and are four times more likely to get into a crash or a near crash event.

Sup­port­ing the NHTSA’s data, the IIHS study found that younger dri­vers were more apt to admit to cell phone use while dri­ving opposed to older dri­vers. Dri­vers 30 and younger spent six­teen per­cent of their dri­ving time on the phone com­pared to the 7 per­cent of dri­vers 30–59 and 2.5 per­cent of dri­vers 60 and older.

Fis­cher explained how she receives clus­ters of e-mails every­day that pass through the Gov­er­nor or Attor­ney Gen­er­als’ Offices ask­ing why the laws aren’t being enforced with cell phones and dri­ving. She enthu­si­as­ti­cally replied with­out hes­i­ta­tion, “We are!”

“Since March 1, 2008, when the pri­mary law took effect until this past March 31, 2010, police offi­cers have issued 243,032 tick­ets. That’s about 10,000 tick­ets each month,” Fis­cher said. “You know, there’s only so many police offi­cers on the road, but the fact that they’re doing some­thing about it, you bet your bot­tom dol­lar that it cer­tainly is help­ing. If one or two peo­ple get a ticket, they will tell their friends, ‘Hey, they really are enforc­ing the law,’ so it does have an impact.”

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Hands-held vs. Hands-free

As of 2010, seven states includ­ing the Dis­trict of Colum­bia ban hand-held phone use. How­ever, each states’ laws dif­fer from another when it comes to phone usage. In 2007, the amount of peo­ple using hand-held cell phones rose to 6 per­cent, an increase from 2006. This per­cent­age trans­lated into 1,005,000 cars on the road at any given time between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. that were being oper­ated by a dri­ver who was using a hand-held device.

This also trans­lated into about eleven per­cent of cars in this time period whose dri­ver was using either a hand-held or hands-free device.

In New Jer­sey, Direc­tor Fis­cher began to find that peo­ple believe hands-free is safer than hand-held, but proved the assump­tion wrong.

“It’s not so much about hold­ing the device, it’s about the men­tal and visual dis­trac­tions that are going on. The visual, of course, being the fail­ure to scan the road and the cog­ni­tive, where our mind is focused on pro­cess­ing the infor­ma­tion com­ing into our ear and not so much as what’s hap­pen­ing in our envi­ron­ment,” Fis­cher said. “Your eyes and mind have lost touch with the idea of dri­ving. Dri­ving has become the sec­ondary activ­ity and talk­ing is the pri­mary activ­ity, so hands-free is not safer.”

She also sta­tis­ti­cally denied the fact that hands-free is any safer than hands-held.

“When you look at the crash reports here in New Jer­sey there’s not a huge dif­fer­ence between hand-held and hands-free crashes,” Fis­cher said. “In 2008 and 2009, there were 3,600 hand-held cell phone crashes, opposed to 3,100 hands-free. And, as a result of those crashes 1,500 peo­ple were injured because of hand-held cell phone use, while 1,400 were injured due to hands-free phone use.”

New Jer­sey is one of the sev­eral states that bans both hands-held phone use and DWT, but doesn’t com­pare to two other states that have enacted laws even fur­ther. In Utah, the use of a hand-held phone has been con­sid­ered a care­less dri­ving offense when com­mit­ting another mov­ing vio­la­tion. Along with Utah, Maine has pushed to resolve this issue by con­sid­er­ing the act a traf­fic infraction.

The Vir­ginia Tech Trans­porta­tion Insti­tute (VTTI) also found in their infa­mous study on dis­tracted dri­ving that hands-free use is no safer than hands-held use. They ruled out the assump­tions due to the inat­ten­tion to the road; when answer­ing, dial­ing and typ­ing on a cell phone, your eyes are required to be off of the road, which is the pri­mary risk asso­ci­ated with cell phone use.

The IIHS sur­vey also found that only twenty nine per­cent of dri­vers in states with hand-held bans who were aware of the bans and twenty two per­cent of dri­vers in states with tex­ting bans who were aware of the restric­tions felt they were strongly enforced. This ties in with Fischer’s expla­na­tion of the prob­lem in the New Jer­sey about the laws actu­ally being enforced. Since peo­ple aren’t see­ing dra­matic results, they believe noth­ing is being done, so they con­tinue to engage in dan­ger­ous and life threat­en­ing acts behind the wheel.

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Stud­ies That Prove Dan­gers of Dis­tracted Driving

Although all age groups have admit­ted to DWT, the younger gen­er­a­tion of dri­vers lead the dan­ger­ous decision-making, as many stud­ies have proven. One notable study that aided in Pres­i­dent Obama’s deci­sion to pro­pose the ALERT Dri­vers Act of 2009 was the dis­tracted dri­ving study men­tioned above by the VTTI.

In 2009, VTTI installed sev­eral sophis­ti­cated cam­eras and instru­men­ta­tion in the par­tic­i­pants’ per­sonal vehi­cles to observe dri­vers under real-world con­di­tions; par­tic­i­pants included light vehi­cle dri­vers and truck dri­vers. These stud­ies observed dri­vers for more than 6 mil­lion miles of driving.

The study found that tex­ting while dri­ving was asso­ci­ated with the high­est risk of all other cell phone related tasks. Talking/listening increased the risk for light vehi­cle dri­vers, but rad­i­cally increased the risk for truck drivers.

Dri­vers of light vehi­cles were almost 3 times more likely to crash if they were dial­ing a phone, 1.3 times more likely if they were talking/listening to a cell phone and 1.4 times more likely if they were reach­ing for an object (usu­ally an elec­tronic device).

On the extreme other hand, truck dri­vers were lit­er­ally hold­ing their lives in their own hands when using cell phones while dri­ving. Heavy vehi­cles and trucks were almost 6 times more likely to crash while dial­ing a phone, 1 time more likely while talking/listening to a cell phone and almost 7 times more likely when reach­ing for an elec­tronic device.

How­ever, the shock­ing sta­tis­tics were revealed when observ­ing DWT in heavy vehi­cles and trucks. Tex­ting makes these dri­vers over 23 times more likely to crash. VTTI also dis­cov­ered that DWT had the longest dura­tion of time that people’s eyes were off of the road; when sending/reading a text mes­sage, VTTI showed that the driver’s eyes were off of the road for 4.6 sec­onds over a 6 sec­ond inter­val. This equates to that dri­ver trav­el­ing the length of a foot­ball field at 55 mph with­out look­ing at the road once.

VTTI has also con­ducted sev­eral other stud­ies to prove the neg­a­tive impact dri­ver inat­ten­tion has on dri­vers and traf­fic acci­dents that occur.

Although two years ear­lier in 2007, another simulated-study on dis­tracted dri­ving was con­ducted at Clem­son Uni­ver­sity. The researchers in Clemson’s psy­chol­ogy depart­ment found that using elec­tronic devices while dri­ving, specif­i­cally cell phones and iPods, caused dri­vers to leave their lanes 10 per­cent more. The study also sup­ported that dri­vers who talked on their cell phones were unable to keep their cars from chang­ing lanes. When tex­ting and dri­ving, dri­vers crossed the cen­ter lane or left their lane in all about 10 per­cent more often.

Along with the VTTI and Clem­son stud­ies, Fis­cher men­tioned another study con­ducted by the Uni­ver­sity of Utah that gauged a person’s abil­ity to multi-task. Recently in 2010, Jason Wat­son and David Strayer, psy­chol­o­gists at the Uni­ver­sity of Utah, assem­bled a group of 200 under­grad­u­ates and asked them to per­form a sim­u­lated dri­ving test as well as a stan­dard­ized mem­ory test that involved math and word mem­o­riza­tion. First, each of the stu­dents per­formed the tasks sep­a­rately then simul­ta­ne­ously. For the mul­ti­task­ing por­tion of the exper­i­ment, researchers asked the vol­un­teers to com­plete a ver­bal ver­sion of the mem­ory test on a hands-free cell phone while dri­ving in a simulator.

The sim­u­la­tion lasted for about and hour and a half and dis­played that ninety seven and a half per­cent of the par­tic­i­pants showed a sig­nif­i­cant decrease in their dri­ving abil­ity and mem­ory while mul­ti­task­ing. How­ever, the study showed that only 2.5 per­cent of peo­ple are “super-taskers.” The psy­chol­o­gists define these super-taskers as peo­ple who are fully capa­ble of mul­ti­task­ing while dri­ving, and in some cases, even per­form bet­ter while mul­ti­task­ing and driving.

Fis­cher believes that this newly gen­er­ated idea of mul­ti­task­ing is doing any­thing but help­ing dri­vers pass time, espe­cially with the amount of peo­ple who are dri­ving while using cell phones.

“Peo­ple are view­ing time in the car as “wasted time, so we’re mov­ing into this whole mind­set of multi-tasking and we’re really putting our safety at risk,” Fis­cher said. “Dri­ving is pretty com­plex. You’ve got to have all of your fac­ul­ties about you to do it (mak­ing split sec­ond deci­sions, etc.) and when you inter­ject another activ­ity into that envi­ron­ment, we’re multi-tasking and we don’t do it very well. What­ever envi­ron­ment we’re in, we need to be it in 100%.”

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Pro­grams That Rid of Poten­tial Tex­ting Dangers

DWT has been proven to be a seri­ous issue and fatal prob­lem that’s pro­gres­sively wors­en­ing, so many com­pa­nies have cre­ated pro­grams to try and pre­vent the dis­ease from spread­ing. There are numer­ous pro­grams that can be acti­vated in a car, at all costs, that will auto­mat­i­cally shut off the phone upon move­ment or dis­al­low the dri­ver from using their cell phone while dri­ving at a cer­tain speed.

These sys­tems have been tar­geted towards GPS-capable smart phones such as Black­Ber­rys and Androids, but are cur­rently being worked on to access other phones as well. Pro­grams such as iZUP and Zoom­Safer block out­go­ing calls and texts, send incom­ing calls to voice­mail and hold incom­ing texts until the car stops. Zoom­safer is more tech­no­log­i­cally savvy since it sends auto replies via Face­book, Twit­ter or email that says the per­son is dri­ving. Another pro­gram adver­tised widely online, Tex­te­cu­tion , blocks texts from a driver’s phone while the car is mov­ing and requires per­mis­sion from a sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor, such as a par­ent, to over­ride it.

Along with these GPS-targeted phone pro­grams, oth­ers such as Cell­Con­trol and Guardian Angel MP com­bine block­ing soft­ware for phones with a small device that plugs into the car’s onboard com­puter. These pro­grams use Blue­tooth to trans­mit speed and other data to the driver’s phone. The sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors of these spe­cific pro­grams are able to cus­tomize set­tings to block any calls, texts and emails once the car reaches a cer­tain speed.

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Life-Changing Deci­sions

Although all age groups have admit­ted to DWT, the younger gen­er­a­tion of dri­vers lead the dan­ger­ous decision-making, as many stud­ies have proven. One notable study that aided in Pres­i­dent Obama’s deci­sion to pro­pose the ALERT Dri­vers Act of 2009 was the dis­tracted dri­ving study men­tioned above by the VTTI.

Many peo­ple have been both directly and indi­rectly affected by dis­tracted dri­vers. DWT has accounted for a large mass of dis­tracted dri­ving and its effects and con­tin­ues to increase each day.

Despite how they’ve been affected, many peo­ple despise the idea of DWT and believe that it should be stopped as soon as it can be, espe­cially Kim, as men­tioned in the begin­ning. After becom­ing a prod­uct of some­one else’s care­less mis­takes and being ejected 25 feet from a car, she is lucky to have sur­vived such a crash.

How­ever, since she was in crit­i­cal con­di­tion at the time of the acci­dent, she had to be air­lifted to a spe­cial­ized trauma cen­ter in Bergen County where her whole face had to be re-constructed. This should serve as an eye-opener to peo­ple who don’t believe it can hap­pen to them. Although Kim was never tex­ting her­self, the fact that Bri­anna was while dri­ving has changed her whole life. From now on, she will never be the same.

“It comes down to rec­og­niz­ing that one of the most pub­lic things we do is drive. We may think we’re doing it in the pri­vacy of our own cars, but the actions you take and the deci­sions you make behind the wheel are very pub­lic and have a rip­ple effect,” Fis­cher said. “Tex­ting and talk­ing on cell phones can effect other peo­ple; say you get in an acci­dent that involves tex­ting, now that other per­son has become a part of your life The mes­sage goes beyond the guy behind the wheel.”

Heather Fiore is a jour­nal­ism major at Rider Uni­ver­sity with a News-Editorial track.  She hopes to work for a mag­a­zine or pres­ti­gious news­pa­per after grad­u­a­tion, prefer­ably in New York City.

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Works Cited

Brooks, Johnell O., and Ross Nor­ton. “Study mea­sures dan­ger of dri­ving while tex­ting.” Clem­son Uni­ver­sity News­room . Clem­son Uni­ver­sity, 31 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. http://www.clemson.edu/newsroom/articles/2008/january/driving_texting.php5

United States. National Con­fer­ence of State Leg­is­la­tures. Cell Phones and High­way Safety: 2006 State Leg­isla­tive Update . By Matt Sun­deen. 1–22. National Con­fer­ence of State Leg­is­la­tures . N.p., Mar. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. http://www.cellphonefreedriving.ca

National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion. An Exam­i­na­tion of Dri­ver Dis­trac­tion as Recorded in NHYSA Data­bases . Wash­ing­ton: National Cen­ter for Sta­tis­tics and Analy­sis, 2009. 1–12. National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion . Web. 22 Apr. 2010. www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CATS/index.aspx

National Trans­porta­tion Safety Board. Most Wanted Trans­porta­tion Safety Improve­ment State Issues . National Trans­porta­tion Safety Board . N.p., Nov. 2008.

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