Texting while driving: The new menace

In Florida, a distracted trucker plows into traffic at a stoplight, causing a 10-car pileup and killing two women. In California, one car rams into the back of another, incinerating one motorist and sending the driver to jail for manslaughter. In Utah, an SUV drifts across the center line of a highway, causing a chain-reaction crash that kills two. In every case, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, the drivers were engaged in one of the most dangerous things you can do behind the wheel—sending text messages. It’s a growing phenomenon: One in five drivers—and half of those between ages 16 and 24—have acknowledged texting on cell phones, BlackBerrys, or other wireless devices when their eyes and minds should have been on the road. They won’t stop, because they’re literally addicted: Every time you get a tweet or a text or an IM or a cell call, scientists say, your brain squirts out a little dopamine—the pleasure chemical. “Left, literally, to our own devices, we spiral out of control.”

Enough of this madness, said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. State governments have to pass anti-texting laws to save drivers from themselves. So why have only 16 states done so? Fortunately, the U.S. Senate is now considering legislation that would deny federal highway funds to states that don’t outlaw texting behind the wheel. Sorry, but a ban on texting would be unenforceable, said USA Today. Besides, drivers also take their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel to attend to “unruly kids, navigation systems, Big Macs, and Big Gulps.” It’s unfair to single out texting and cell phone calls when drivers now indulge in a dozen different distractions.

There are distractions and then there are distractions, said Jacquielynn Floyd in The Dallas Morning News. Typing on a tiny keyboard while hurtling along at 60 mph is beyond stupid. “It’s nuts!” When drivers of heavy trucks text, a recent study found, they’re 23 times more likely to crash. Merely reaching for a hand-held electronic device increases the risk of an accident by about six times. I text while driving all the time, said Rob Getzschman in The Christian Science Monitor, and “done right, it’s a thing of natural beauty, a ballet of manual and technical dexterity.” But I value my life, so I’d welcome a legal ban and a crackdown by the cops. Addicts like me need a strong legal incentive “to do the right thing: Drive now, text later.”

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