Teens Texting While Driving Are More Likely to Crash Than When Driving Drunk

Fact: Teen drivers are 4x more likely to be involved in fatal car accidents than adult drivers.

Fact: Drivers using hand-held devices (like mp3 players and cell phones) while driving are 4x more likely to get into car accidents than undistracted drivers.

Fact: Drivers texting while driving are 23x more likely to get into car accidents than undistracted drivers.

These are not opinions or exaggerations, and they aren’t just scare tactics dreamed up by old people, either. These are the cold, hard, tested and proven facts. Unfortunately, in spite of local and national efforts to increase awareness of the dangers of texting while driving, many teen drivers still think they can do what they like and not suffer any harm.

Texting and driving is, in fact, a serious problem among teen drivers (and drivers of all ages, actually), and the solution lies squarely on the shoulders of those drivers themselves.

In other words, dear driver, only you can keep yourself from becoming a statistic. Nobody else can do it for you.

Studies at Virginia Technical Transportation Institute, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, have shown that the average time it takes drivers to send or receive a text message is 4.6 seconds. If you’re driving on the freeway at 55 mph, then that means your vehicle just travelled the length of a football field while your eyes and attention were on your phone instead of on the road.

And if you were travelling at speeds greater than 55 mph, then you just blew right past the football field, through the parking lot, and out into the field across the street while sending that short little text.

The editors at Car & Driver Magazine decided to do their own test and made a startling discovery: texting and driving may actually be more dangerous than drinking and driving. Well how did they come to that conclusion? They didn’t actually get their staffers drunk and then put them in the driver’s seat, did they?

Well…yes.

That’s exactly what they did.

After pounding back several Screwdrivers each, with a BAC of .08% – just a hair under the legal blood-alcohol limit – both drivers (C&D editor Eddie Alterman and intern Jordan Brown) demonstrated slower reaction times while driving on a controlled, isolated track (actually, it was a stretch of pavement at the local airport). Their delayed reactions were not surprising.

What was unexpected, however, was just how much worse the drivers performed while reading and writing text messages prior to their vodka and orange juice induced adventures. Texting and driving while sober led to stopping distances that were 6x-17x greater than when they were driving while intoxicated.

Remember that “football field” comparison earlier? In one of Alterman’s texting tests, he drove right through it…all the way into the locker rooms (319 feet farther than his undistracted braking distance)!

So realistically, what are teenage drivers supposed to do about this? Should they not use their phones when driving? Should they even turn their phones off when driving? Should they actually follow the law when driving?

Duh.

Well, there are some technological compromises that can at least move us in the right direction. Obviously there are hands-free headsets that can be used for making phone calls, but what about texts, emails, and social media?

Actually, there are some pretty cool phone apps available that can knock the danger level down a bit. The AT&T DriveMode app can send automatic responses to incoming texts, letting the senders know that you are busy driving and will text them back as soon as you can.

There are also apps that can read your emails and Facebook messages out loud to you as you drive, and they can even convert your spoken responses into text responses. However, this speech-to-text conversion ability is still being developed for actual text messages. New apps are constantly popping up – even free ones – but be sure to watch out for apps with poor reviews. The technology is still in its infancy, so don’t expect perfection just yet.

Of course, even without an app, you could still just send out a mass text to everybody as you buckle up:

“…hey guys, driving atm so don't expect a text back for a half hour or so. luv u =)…”

How hard is that, right? Even your adorable, control-freak boyfriend can understand that one and wait til you’re parked.

The point is that keeping your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road as you drive is literally a matter of life and death. Don’t be a statistic. Texting while driving causes accidents, so be a safe teen driver and keep your phone in your pocket while you’re driving.