Approximately 1.4 million accidents occur during phone conversations and two hundred thousand from texting.3 Texting drivers may be as impaired as a driver who is legally drunk. Laws should be changed or enacted to prevent senseless accidents, and unnecessary deaths. About five thousand people die annually texting while driving.3 Three-hundred thousand people are hospitalized for injuries obtained from accidents cause by phone use in the vehicle.4 Again no state in the U.S. completely bans all cellular phone use in the vehicle for all age groups.1 Without firm, enforced laws or probations regarding phone use in vehicles this issue will continue to grow worse. 1. 2012, Texting And Distracted Driving Infograaphic, retrieved on 2014, January 27, from:
It asks if a total ban is the answer. Just recently the National Transportation Safety Board is now calling for a complete ban of use of cellular devices by all drivers including hands-free devices. The National Transportation Safety Board is the federal agency promotes traffic safety and investigates accidents. They say that drivers face a serious risk while talking and driving even if you do not need to remove your hands from the stirring wheel. In fact, the likelihood that the driver will get into an automobile accident is just the same as someone who has a blood alcohol level of .08 percent, which is when a person is legally intoxicated.
“If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell, phone their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone,” said University psychology professor David Strayer. Drivers under the age of twenty do not have fast reflexes. Teenagers think they can talk or text message while driving, but they really can not. It will only lead to accident, or worse, a
The drinking age should not be lowered to 18. Lowering the drinking age from 21 years old to 18 years old could lead to an increase in dangerous behavior such as drunken driving and car accidents, risk of developing alcoholism and people under the age of 21 do not fully understand the dangers of alcohol. A teenage driver and alcohol is a dangerous combination. Drinking and driving accidents are the number one cause of death among teenagers. “Traffic deaths from drunken driving have fallen steadily, with those involving teenagers 16 to 19 declining by 39.1 percent from 1982 to 1990, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)”.
Many states began passing legislation either in response to fatal crashes involving texting while driving, or near fatal crashes that involved texting while driving. By the early part of 2010, 21 states had banned texting while driving. De Soto provides numerous statistics that compare drunk driving to texting. The studies were used showed that texting while driving is just as dangerous to public safety as drunk driving. De Soto list several fatal and non-fatal accidents cases from New York to Washington State from texting while driving.
It is believed that actively using a cell phone while driving increases the likelihood of an accident by as much as four times the rate as those who do not use a cell phone. Drivers are paying less attention to the other vehicles and pedestrians around them thereby endangering not only their lives but also the lives of those individuals caught in their path. As such the use of a cell phone while operating a motor vehicle should be restricted. Legislation needs to be passed which would help curb the widespread use of cell phones in vehicles. To date legislators have won the fight to protect our children from such negligent individuals who choose to endanger their lives and the lives of other around them; however further action needs to be taken.
Some states have banned the use of use of cellphone use unless used with a hands free device and some states banned texting while driving. If all cell phone use is banned while driving, some accidents will not occur. Are accidents rates lower for drivers that do not use cell phones? We know that car accidents happen daily, caused by faulty equipment and weather. The truth of the matter is that sometimes accidents cannot be avoided, but if adding in a distraction such as cell phone use, it increases the accident rate.
“Incidents of “road rage” were up 51% in the first half of the decade, according to a report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety,” writes Andrew Ferguson in Road Rage (553). It’s sad that due to road rage many innocent commuters suffer the consequences. It has also happened to me while driving; because I’m driving to slow, the person behind me starts to blow the horn. And, it makes thing worse because then I will get mad and drive even slower. In Road Rage, Ferguson points out that in a recent survey that the Coalition for Consumer Health and Safety did, 64% of the people mentioned that they are driving less mannerly and more recklessly than they did about five years ago (553).
Because of this many people die for no reason. In addition, Secondly, banning cell phones while driving will decrease the amount of teenager’s death in car accidents. For example, according to http://www.car-accidents.com/teen-car-accidents.html, 5000 teenagers die by car accidents. If teenagers don’t use cell phones while driving, 1200 teenagers are going to be excluded from the list. This shows the reader to know that how life is important and nothing can compare to teenager’s life.
I would consider adopting the new law of cell phone use being banned while operating a motor vehicle. I say this because of all the accidents that have occurred with teens and even elder people talking on the phone while driving. Also, because cell phones can be a distraction, even when the cell phone is not in use. There are many reasons why cell phones usage should be banned while driving I will only state a few but at the end of my essay you will understand my reasoning. Cell phone usage while driving is a very touchy subject.