Distracted Driving: Should Talking, Texting Be Banned?
Contemporary drivers are habitually using their cell phones while they are driving. This is one of the most frequent cases of distracted driving that have made a large number of people lose their lives. The tendency of people to send text messages while driving has, therefore, attracted substantial research from scholars who have been attempting to determine the correlation between texting on the phone while driving, and the likelihood of being involved in an accident.
It has, thus, been proven that the probability of being involved in an accident while sending a text message on the highway is very high as compared to that of being involved in an accident without using your phone on the highway (Richmond 1). Despite this fact which has been widely publicized and the fact that the law prohibits the use of phones while driving, drivers, especially, the youth are increasingly involved in phone-related accidents in America.
Driving while texting on the phone is among the riskiest and most careless things any person can do. It is, indubitably, bound to make the driver unaware of the situation of the road. When on the phone, it is very likely that a driver will have the pressure of multitasking and thus, he/she will not be able to concentrate on the highway. His/her reaction time, to occurrences that may lead to an accident, will also be longer than that for a driver who is not using the phone.
Worse still, some drivers completely lose concentration when multitasking driving with texting the phone (Cruz 1). This is particularly the case when a driver tries to communicate an extremely important or urgent message that needs extra concentration. The driver may concentrate on the phone so much that he/she may even lose track of the road. This may lead to accidents since the driver may even end up falling, rolling, hitting cyclers, etc depending on the state of the highway where the same occurs.
It all starts with an important or urgent text message that the driver has to send to somebody. May be the driver has been forgetting to reply a text sent to him/her by a colleague at work and the message in the text is subject to a deadline. The driver, in this case, may find himself/herself trying to reply the text or call the colleague in order to meet the stated deadline. This may make him/her lose concentration on the road and be prone to being involved in an accident.
Other people just get involved in this habit due to alleged boredom while driving (Cruz 2). A teenager may be driving home and, out of boredom, decide to decide to ask his girlfriend what movie she will watch in the evening. The conversation may end up being so lengthy that the teenager loses concentration on the road. This could lead to an accident injuring him or even killing him. It, therefore, does not matter how urgent or irrelevant the message is. What matters is that while using your phone on the highway, you are actually risking your life and, equally, the lives of other people. It is therefore of essence that drivers make sure that they do not use their cell phones while driving, no matter how important the message they want to send is.
I personally experienced the subject of this discussion just six months ago. We were returning home from a trip with all the members of my family. My dad likes to drive us whenever we travel as a family and on that day, he was the one driving. He received a text message as the rest of us were busy chatting. Just as he was trying to read the text, another vehicle was trying to overtake us but he did not notice since he was busy on the phone. Our car had substantially shifted from its lane such that the other vehicle could not overtake us easily. The vehicle brushed our vehicle and we almost rolled over. We were all tensed until we arrived home. It was a lesson learnt for all of us because we all talked about the incident and the risks that using a cell phone on the highway may cause a serious accident.
A score of lives have been lost due to distracted driving and although the law prohibits it, drivers are still using their phones on the highway. Statistics of this kind of distracted driving have proved, without any doubt that most drivers believe that they can never be victims of accidents caused by distracted driving until they actually get involved in one. Any prudent driver will never use a cell phone while on the highway since he/she knows that life may fail to give him/her a chance to learn from experience. It is thus of essence that we take individual responsibility over our lives and general safety by avoiding the use of cell phones while on the highway. The government should also put reliable and sustainable frameworks for ensuring that the habit is phased out.
Works Cited
Cruz, Gilbert. “Distracted Driving: Should Talking, Texting Be Banned?” 2009. Web.
Richmond, Rose. “Talking and Texting While Driving Increase Car Accidents Every Year.” 2008. Web.