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Texting and Driving

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Texting and Driving
Texting and Driving Texting has become a daily thing, it’s quicker than a phone call and it’s easy to keep in touch with everybody. But with texting, just like talking, comes the people who think they can text and drive. Texting takes about five seconds, but in that minute a lot of things can happen, you can run off the road, hit a car, hit a tree, the possibilities are endless. To type a text it usually takes five seconds, when driving at 55mph in five seconds you go as far as a football field. A texting driver is 23 times more likely to get into a crash than a non-texting driver. Using a cell phone while driving, whether it's handheld or hands-free, delays a driver's reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. The age group with the greatest proportion of distracted drivers was the under-20 age group. 16% of all drivers younger than 20 involved in fatal crashes were reported to have been distracted while driving. 60% of drivers use cell phones while driving. An online survey of 1,999 teens ages 16-19 found that 86% had driven while distracted even though 84% know it's dangerous. 34% of teens who drive while distracted simply say they're used to multi-tasking. 22% of teens who drive while distracted say it makes driving less boring. 21% of teens who drive while distracted say they're used to being connected to people all the time. 35% of teens who drive while distracted don't think they'll get hurt. 77% of young adult drivers are very/somewhat confident that they can safely text while driving. 85% of respondents who text while driving agrees that texting while driving is a problem and 89% recognize that the behavior reduces reaction time. Brain power used while driving decreases by 40% when a driver listens to conversation or music. 36% of teens say they have been involved in a near-crash because of their own or someone else's distracted driving. While over 90% of teen drivers say they don't drink and drive, 9 out of 10 say they've seen passengers distracting the driver, or drivers using cell phones. Distracted driving is the number one killer of American teens. Alcohol-related accidents among teens have dropped, but teenage traffic fatalities have remained unchanged because distracted driving is on the rise. About half of drivers 16 to 24 said they had texted while driving, compared with 22 percent of drivers 35 to 44. (http://www.stoptextsstopwrecks.org/#facts)

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