TXT Messaging And Driving - A Deadly Combination For Teens

July 18, 2007 – 1:15 pm

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It’s a parent’s worst nightmare… finding out that their teenage son or daughter has been hurt or killed in a car accident while they were driving.

The basics of learning how to drive haven’t changed that much since I learned to drive many, many years ago, but the introduction of the cell phone has changed the way many teens approach driving.

I was browsing through through headlines at a local website and found an article that claimed a recent poll in the teen magazine Seventeen revealed that 28% of 1000 teen girls asked admitted to sending TXT messages via their mobile phone while behind the wheel of a car. In my opinion, this is far worse than people just making a phone call, as it involves the teen concentrating on typing a bad language translation in TXT speak… taking both their eyes and hands of the road.

A visit to ABC News quickly brought up confirmation of the dangers of TXT messaging while driving a car.

A 17 year old girl was driving with four friends on her way to a vacation home and was involved in a head on collision that killed her all of her friends in one flash of the pan.

Her cell phone records indicate that she (or possibly someone else inside the car) sent a TXT message and a reply came back less than a minute later. It read “What R U doing?” 37 seconds after that TXT was received, the police got a call that her collided with a tractor trailer.

It seems that her their lives were ended over something that could have easily been avoided.. or at least delayed until they arrived at their final destination. Could that little TXT message really have been worth the loss of life?

What are your thoughts on TXT messaging while driving? Do you do it?

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