Texting increases the chances of rear end collisions. If you needed more proof of this, all you would need to do is look at a recent study published in Car and Driver magazine, which specifically tested two drivers to see how their stopping distance was affected by texting and driving. Whether they were reading a text or sending a text, both drivers performed much more poorly when they were texting than they did when they were not. To make things even worse, they actually performed more poorly when texting than they did while intoxicated in some of the tests.
How?
People like to think that they’re good at multitasking. Studies conducted on some of the brightest students in MIT concluded that people are actually not good at multitasking in any regard. Even when the best and the brightest were asked to perform more than one task at once, they performed each task worse than they would have if they were only concentrating on one task at a time. It is simply a scientific fact that your brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time. True, your brain can switch back and forth between what it pays attention to rapidly but a car moves much more quickly than your brain.
When people text and drive, they will typically hold their phone in a position that makes it comfortable to read and type and that allows them to steer the vehicle, as well. A very common position is to hold the phone right on the steering wheel.
If you’re traveling at freeway speed, you can go a very long distance in a second. Whether or not you’re aware of it, it takes you more than a second to look down and read a sentence on a text message. It takes you longer than that to look down and type a reply. Whenever you’re doing one of these things, you’re looking at the phone, you’re not driving. Don’t kid yourself. You are not multitasking, you are going back and forth between two tasks and one of them – driving – is something that is a life-and-death matter.
Because your braking distance and reaction time are decreased when you are texting, the chances that you’ll end up slamming into a vehicle in front of you are higher than they would be if you were paying attention. If somebody rear ends you because they were texting, you should speak to an attorney about filing a lawsuit for negligence.
