Texting and Driving - The Facts - Vol.370
Every year, approximately 1.3 million people die in road accidents around the world. This means more than 3,000 deaths every day. Although accidents can happen anywhere and to anyone, texting while driving - a dangerous habit that endures despite the expensive campaigns and the devastating evidence against it is directly responsible for many of those accidents.
Mobile Devices and the Road
We are living in the golden age of technology, and that is not always a good thing. On one hand, this revolution is welcomed as medical science can save more people and prolong lives, but when it comes to texting and driving, technology is yet to make a truly positive impact. Phones today are basically portable entertainment centers, capable of running high-definition movies or streaming live music from the internet. They are also easily available, so almost everyone has one. With the need to communicate being a part of human nature, it seems that people simply cannot stop texting, even while they are behind the wheel.
The Statistics
If you text and drive, you are 23 times more likely to crash, and the consequences could be fatal. Worldwide stats are not dependable, but we have some accurate data for the U.S. and Europe. In the United States alone, 69% of drivers admitted to using their mobile device within the last 30 days while driving. Texting and driving is not only widespread, but it is also frequent.
Some European countries do much better than that, with a European low of 29%, although the United Kingdom with its 59% is not far behind the U.S. America leads every other country in distractions as well. Thirty-one percent of drivers allow themselves to get distracted, while the same numbers in Spain stand at 15%. In the United States, people send more than 250 billion text messages a year, and teens are especially prone to do it while driving.
An Endangered Age Group
Teenagers are prone to making judgmental errors, and driving is not an exception to this rule. These days, young people are extremely tech-savvy, and they often think of their mobile device as an extension of who they are. They store their photos and memories on them, and with an attachment like that, it's no wonder they feel that they have to constantly use their device.
Unfortunately, the results are nothing short of catastrophic. Teenagers are much more likely to text while driving, and they are also more likely to crash.
Young people - under the age of 20 - make up 27% of the drivers in fatal accidents that involved some kind of distraction. Just looking at the phone and getting distracted for a moment increases the likelihood of getting into an accident by 300%. Texting and driving is an epidemic, and since crashes in which nobody is injured are under-reported, the numbers could be significantly higher.
Many American states and countries have laws against texting and driving, but it still isn't considered a crime, despite the fact that it's actually more dangerous than impaired driving.
Possible Solutions
When we are thinking about the solutions to this epidemic, technology, ironically, tops the list. What created the problem in the first place could actually help us solve it, in the form of self-driving cars.
Several companies have already developed self-driving cars that drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, and the results are very encouraging. While Google's car had a small crash because of the indecision of the software, it happened in a situation where the possibility of a serious collision was virtually non-existent.
The vast majority of experts agree that self-driving cars could significantly reduce the number of vehicular deaths, maybe by as much as 95%.
The other solution has to come from the legal side-- upgrading texting and driving from misconduct to criminal act nationwide could make a tremendous impact.