On Our Mind: Driving with cell phones

It’s something most of us do on a daily basis without even thinking about it: talking on our cell phones while driving. Many of us send text messages while driving as well.

The Emporia Gazette reported that last month a teen was involved in a one-vehicle accident in Emporia and told police that she was texting at the time of her accident. She drove into a traffic-control sign, snapping off a utility pole a couple of feet above the ground.

While the teen did not have serious injuries, not everybody is always as lucky.

According to a study of drivers in Perth, Australia, conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety posted on www.iii.org, motorists who use cell phones while driving are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.

According to the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study posted on www.iii.org and released in April 2006, almost 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes involved some form of driver inattention within three seconds of the event. The most common distraction is the use of cell phones, followed by drowsiness.

Some states have laws banning driving while talking on handheld cell phones, including California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Washington and the District of Columbia. Washington State is the only state that has taken it a step further and created an additional law in May 2007 that penalizes drivers who are texting with a $101 ticket.

We are proposing that Kansas legislators consider adopting similar laws that prohibit talking on handheld and hands-free cell phones while driving. Because we think text messaging is more distracting than talking while driving, we believe texting should be included in the ban.

In the article on their Web site, The Emporia Gazette cited a statistic by JupiterResearch, LLC, which stated that 18- to 24-year-olds in 2007 ranked highest of all age groups in “short messaging service.”

Considering that this age range encompasses most college students, it’s essential for us to think twice before using our phones while driving. No text message or phone call is more important than our lives or safety.