Washington was the first state to recognize the dangers of texting while driving and banned the practice in 2007. Since then, 40 additional states, as well as D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam have done the same. The reason is simple: Texting causes accidents. Texting kills. The wonder is that nine states haven’t yet seen fit to prohibit something that is so clearly dangerous, and at the same time unnecessary.
Consider some facts, gleaned from a variety of sources, including the National Safety Council, the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis Study, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Fatality Facts, and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration:
- Distracted driving, including texting behind the wheel, causes more than a million accidents annually, resulting in 330,000 injuries and deaths – often pedestrians, cyclists, and persons in other vehicles.
- Eleven teenagers die every day in texting-related auto accidents.
- Texting makes a driver 23 times more likely to crash than attentive driving.
- A car at highway speed travels the length of one and a half football fields in five seconds – the typical amount of time a texting driver diverts his or her eyes from the road.
And on, and on, and on. Perhaps the real wonder is that, with an estimated 800,000 drivers texting in the U.S. at any given moment, any of us is still alive to think about this.
In Washington – again, the first state to ban texting while driving – the State Patrol (WSP), along with many county and city police departments, will be conducting distracted-driving emphasis patrols throughout the month of August. And coincidentally, this month also saw the release of “From One Second to the Next,” a half-hour public-service documentary by acclaimed director Werner Herzog.
Herzog’s film, which eschews blood and guts and hyperbole in favor of low-key but powerful personal testimony from drivers who have killed and families of victims, was commissioned by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, the country’s largest wireless carriers. It’s only been out a few days, and it’s not yet racking up “Simon’s Cat” numbers on Youtube, but there are plans to make it available to middle and high schools nationwide this fall.
Last year the WSP issued 6,620 tickets for talking on cell phones behind the wheel, and 1,025 for texting. It’s a difficult law to enforce, officers say, and too often the evidence becomes clear only after something has gone wrong.
Evidence, for example, like the text being sent at the moment a driver in “From One Second to the Next” ran a stop sign and paralyzed five-year-old Xzavier Bilbo-Davis from the diaphragm down: “I’m on my way.”