By Maddie Mattheson

At any given moment in America, about 660,000 drivers are distracted by manipulating or using an electronic device while driving (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Whether it’s texting, dialing a cell phone number or choosing a song to play, anything that is associated with the use of hand-held phones or other portable devices increases the collision risk by three times (Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, VTTI). With this being said, it is clear that state laws on cell phone use should be more strictly enforced nationwide.

Motor vehicle collisions are harmful in several ways. Crashes can result in potential harm to one’s self or passengers, health care costs, insurance administration, and property damage to the vehicle itself, which can often be highly expensive. In the worst case, motor vehicle collisions can be fatal. For a person under 20 years of age, on top of college payments and anything else they may have to pay, paying to get a damaged motor vehicle fixed is nearly impossible for them to be able to handle. The cost of putting oneself and others at risk in more ways than one is simply not worth it.

In Massachusetts, texting while driving is banned for all drivers, and cell phone use while driving is restricted to any junior operator. However, many simply forget to turn their phone off before getting behind the wheel, or just ignore the law altogether. People believe that they are never part of the statistics, and that they can just defy the horrifying odds of having a potentially fatal collision while driving distracted. Safe driving requires undivided manual, visual, and cognitive attention all at once, and even one glance towards a portable device or cell phone can drastically impair that focus.

Policemen aren’t aiming to give someone a ticket for texting while driving just because they can. They are looking out for the drivers’, passengers’, and bystanders’ safety any time they pull someone over for doing such a thing. Every time they pull a person over, they are only preventing what could have potentially gone terribly wrong.

On average, ones’ eyes are off the road for about 5 seconds if texting. At 55 miles/hr, 5 seconds is just long enough to cover the length of a football field completely (VTTI, 2009). In those 5 seconds, you are putting yourself and hundreds of others around you at risk. Driving on a publically-owned road is a privilege granted to individuals who have proven that they can drive safely and can continue to do so until they are no longer able to drive. It is clearly proven that it is simply not possible to drive safely while distracted, because it increases collision chances by 3. Take the responsibility of the privilege you earned and drive undistracted.

In 2012 alone, 3,328 people were killed in collisions caused by distracted driving (distraction.gov), many of the victims being those who drive safely but were unfortunate enough to be around a careless driver who chose to attempt to defy statistics, and failed. Texting while driving is a colossal issue across America and that needs to change immediately. Be smart and choose to not distract yourself while driving, or become just another part of a statistic. Texting and other distractions while on the road can always wait.

Source:

“Distracted Driving | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration | Texting and Driving.” Distracted Driving | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration | Texting and Driving. National Highway Traffic Safety Association, n.d. Web. 31 Oct. 2014.