Before you find out the hard way, texting and driving in Dallas could get you in trouble because of the city’s distracted driving laws. There are plenty of reasons that distracted driving laws are on the books. In fact, a survey put out by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention in June of 2012 found that a full 58 percent of high school seniors had texted or send e-mails while they were behind the wheel during the previous month.
Driving while you’re texting is particularly dangerous. Simply put, there’s no way that you can be paying attention to both the road in front of you and the text message that you are reading or writing. Because of this, drivers who engage in this type of distracted driving pose serious threats to the drivers around them. When you’re texting and driving, your car may move many feet before you look up at the road again. That is precisely where the problem lies.
Moving Fast
Even looking down for a second to read a text message while you’re on the freeway can mean that you move well over 80 feet. A couple of seconds and you move closer to 200 feet. That’s plenty of time for something to happen in front of you that you don’t see and to end up slamming into somebody.
The types of accidents that happen when people are particularly distracted from the road in front of them tend to be among the worst. These include the rear end accidents that end up causing multi car pileups, accidents involving striking and killing pedestrians and accidents involving slamming into other cars that are crossing intersections. If you consider how much information you’re taking in at any given time when you’re on the road, it’ll be apparent to you how much you’re missing when you’re looking down at your cellular phone.
A statewide ban on texting while driving was recently vetoed by the governor. Dallas and other municipalities nearby have their own bans on texting while driving, however. In general, whether or not it’s legal, you shouldn’t be looking at your text messages while you’re driving. Hands-free devices are widely available and provide acceptable solutions to needing to answer phone calls when you’re driving. As for reading text messages or e-mails, either pullover or wait until you reach your destination to do either. It’s just too dangerous to do anything else.
