Katia Suarez
Professor Walter Smelt
English
5 December 2012
Texting While Driving
We all watch the news and see week after week that innocent people are ending up in hospitals, in critical condition or even dead because drivers cannot stop texting while driving. We think that it will never happen to us until it does and that’s the problem. Texting while driving has recently become one of our nation’s most prominent epidemics. Since technology keeps advancing it is becoming harder for drivers to fully focus on the road. This was never a problem in the past generation. It seems that with the new generation of teenager drivers, the laws that the government are trying to implement are not working and that texting while driving has escalated to emailing, Internet, and social media use while driving.
Although much harm arises with the issue of texting while driving, this problem does not have many solutions. The optimal goal here is to get everyone to stop texting while driving, but people are stubborn. Drivers do not realize that they are putting other people at risk besides themselves when they text and drive. People also do not realize that motor vehicle accidents can happen to anyone at any age. Texting and driving rates may peak between the ages of 16 and 19, according to a recent survey conducted by AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. This study, conducted from April 15 to May 12, 2009, found that 51.4 percent of surveyed drivers between the ages of 16 to 19 admitted to texting or e-mailing while driving (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety 2009). The rates decline consistently with age, but people still do it even though they know the dangers. The solution to this is more than education and laws, it is education with an incentive along with a hands-free Bluetooth application. Education alone is not helping to solve the dilemma of texting while driving.
Teenagers are becoming more irresponsible with the way they use technology. It is becoming a problem in every aspect of life. It is a problem at the dinner table, in school, and it is especially a problem behind the steering wheel of a car. Today’s generation is not able to separate the appropriate time to use a cell phone from the inappropriate time: teens are “text-crazy” (Gardner 1). In a journal written by Dr. Lisa A. Gardner, she states that texting has made driving much more risky than it has been in the past years, 23.3 percent riskier to be exact. Since this is a new problem the United States is facing for the first time, no one knows of a solution that can fix it right away. Past generations have not faced this before and the new generations do not recognize it as an issue, so the problem continues on escalating.
In the past generations, technology was not as advanced as it is today. Cell phones were just used to dial numbers to talk to others. Texting did not exist, emailing was something limited to those with access to computers and no one knew what social media networks were. Now since people have it at the grasp of their fingertips, people are not able to separate themselves from their personal portable devices. According to some research done by State Farm, an insurance company, texting while driving by drivers between the ages of 18 and 29 has either stayed the same or decreased but the percentage of those drivers using the internet while driving has dramatically increased (Distracted Drivers). Now the problem is not only texting while driving but cell phone use in general. “According to the NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year [2010] in distraction-related accidents.” (Distracted Drivers) One solution many have suggested is to make laws banning texting while driving and even cell phone use completely. Some states in the United States have passed laws banning the use of texting while driving. Instead of lowering the number of accidents caused by distracted driving, 3 out of the 4
