A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post about how the state of driving has become more perilous because of distracted driving — which, though a broad behavior that encompasses many dangers, has come to mean texting while driving. In that post, we talked about the sheer number of texting while driving accidents that seemingly happen all the time, as a quick Google search will indicate.
Now there is a new survey that has been released detailing just how dismissive some people are when it comes to texting while driving. The study was performed by AT&T, and it found that while 98 percent of drivers who owned a cellphone and texted regularly knew about the dangers posed by texting while driving, a whopping three-quarters of them still engaged in the dangerous behavior at some point in the past year.
It’s a staggering bit of cognitive dissonance, and it establishes a couple of things: how addicting texting and cellphones can be, and how we lack the proper understanding of how texting impacts us when we drive.
You can travel so far in just a few seconds when you’re driving at 60 miles per hour. Hundreds of feet just flash by in that time. Traffic can change drastically in that time, or someone could have attempted to change lanes in front of you during that time. And a few seconds is all it takes to get someone’s eyes off the road and onto a text.
Texting increases your chances of getting into an accident, and it puts lives at risk every day. Everyone needs to do their part to keep their cellphone in their pocket, and to remind their friends to do the same, while driving.
Source: KSTP, “Survey Finds People Text and Drive Knowing Dangers,” Nov. 5, 2014