Phones & Driving

In today's day and age, cellphones are extremely portable and accessible. Cellphones now seem to alway be in our hands and there've been debates on when we can and can't use them. Cellphones are always there even during crucial times and the wrong times. Texting and driving is an extremely dangerous act that causes major distractions, puts your life as well as others in danger.

Since the creation of the cellphone in 1973, phones have caused distractions. The creation of text in 1992 enhanced the distractions the cellphones caused and ever since then the distractions have gotten bigger. Those distractions while doing an activity that demands so much attention such as driving can be extremely dangerous, especially texting while driving. Texting while driving makes up 1 out of 4 car accidents, leads to 1.6 million crashes a year, and causes about 400,000 injuries each year.

Car accidents not only injure those who text and drive but it also leads to second hand effects of it. Thousands of injuries and deaths happen yearly due to distracted drivers harming others and those people could be passengers or just pedestrians. The danger for those who aren't the distracted driver are usually higher, since the passengers in the back don't have airbags and random pedestrians have no protection against the driver. Drivers shouldn't just take themselves into consideration, but also the safety of others around them.

The characteristics of distracted driving have been compared to their types of impairment driving. Driving such as drunk driving have been compared to distracted driving and drunk driving has even been proven to be less dangerous in some ways than distracted driving. Distracted driving had well over 100,000 more injuries than drunk driving, but drunk driving has well over 6,000 more deaths attributed towards it. The age group for distracted driving is mainly shifted towards teenagers and young adults between 18-24, rather that of the 26-29 range of drunk driving. It's been suggested that at any given point there'll be over 660,000 drivers using their phones while behind the wheel of a vehicle. States that ban cellphones at the wheel have resulted in the increase of hands free use as impaired to the states who haven't.

These numbers in accidents and deaths tend to go up or stagger any given year, the numbers won't go down if no ban on cellphones at wheel is placed. Teenagers are the most affected by any distractions caused by a cellphone, making them most likely to get in an accident. Distracted driving has resulted in more accidents than drunk driving and a plentiful number of unfortunate deaths. No driver, in any capacity should be allowed to drive while texting or distracted in any matter by a cellphone. It should be illegal and carrying the same punishments as a DUI would considering the number of accidents caused by such driving.

Citations:

https://www. edgarsnyder. com/car-accident/cause-of-accident/cell-phone/cell-phone-statistics. html https://arrivealivetour. com/unite/distracted-driving-vs-drunk-driving-which-is-more-dangerous/