Texting while driving should be illegal. Texting while driving puts you and people around you at risk. During class when we did the “Speed Texting” I had a time of 1.75 seconds to finish the shortcut “IDK”. That means I typed a character in about 58 milliseconds. When a car is moving at a speed of 30mph through a typical neighborhood. This means it travels 0.5mpm and 0.00833mps (44fps). Now as we move on to the highway where 70mph, or 1.166mpm, or 0.0194mps (102fps) is the normal speed limit. When I type “IDK” the car in the residential area would have went 52.5 feet. To show you in a visual way the first car would only take 6.81 seconds. The second car traveling about 30 mph would make it across a NFL football field in 3 second. To show this in a different way understanding how many football fields do you think it would take? The answer is each car can travel in the time it took to type in that text. Car 1 would have traveled 0.6453 football fields, or in other terms 65% of a football field. On the other hand, Car 2 would have traveled approximately 1.5 football fields, or 150% of it.

Texting and driving on the highway might seem more dangerous but they are generally straight, and the only obstacles are other cars. Residential neighborhoods are the more dangerous ones. All of them have pedestians, buildings, turns, and other dangerous obstacles. If you aren’t paying close attention, you might hit one of these objects, not to mention other cars. Residential streets also have little to no space for dodging an out of control car. Highways do have a small wall. Don’t get me wrong it is still not okay to text while driving. You are going significantly faster, so if you crash, the impact is greater. Potential objects that you can hit are cars, signs, and fences.

In 2010, around 28.5% of teen deaths were traffic-related. In the same year, just over 1% of non-teen deaths were caused by the same reason. When a distracted driver gets into an accident, they also risk the lives of others. In 2010, 40% of traffic-related deaths were not the driver, they were passengers or pedestrians.

So why do people text and drive? It’s one of the main ways to communicate with people. After a while the steering starts to become second nature and you think you can do anything. That is probably what a person who texts while driving might thinking, but as you can see, the numbers prove that it is extremely dangerous. Getting rid of this matter completely will be very difficult and may not be achieved. Putting a punishment may decrease the number of people who do this. The police can’t monitor everyone to see if they are texting while driving, but an idea might be to put some built-in mechanism and if it senses you texting, it could shut off the phone. We most likely don’t have the technology to do this but it’s still an option. A very costly fine might be the next best option, but that already exists. All the numbers show that texting and driving is not safe and puts lots of people at risk. I hope this problem can be solved. The number of text related deaths is certainly not going down. Be safe while driving.