Annotated Bib # 3- Road Texting

Mello Jr., John P. “Road Texting: An Accident Waiting to Happen.” TechNewsWorld 08 Aug. 2007. ECT News Network. 30 Apr. 2009 <http://www.technewsworld.com/story/58714.html?wlc=1228500522>.

This article establishes a lot of informative facts about text messaging and driving. According to Frank Drews, an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Utah, a person talking on the phone while driving is four times more likely to get in an accident then a person who isn’t on the phone. A person who is texting while driving is six times more likely to wreck. After a simulation project that dealt with students and texting and driving, he found that texters took 23 percent longer to react to the driving simulations than the non-texters. To elaborate, texters took 1,077 milliseconds to react to brake lights verses the 881 milliseconds for non-texters.

Aside from the simulation project, Pinger, a mobile voice messaging company, concluded from a survey, that 89 percent of adults find text messaging dangerous, yet 57 percent of those surveyed confessed to sending text messages while driving.

Surprisingly, some cell phone carriers are taking action. Sprint Nextel claims to not oppose laws trying to be made but do not think it is the solution to the issue. Lastly, in result of that, some carriers are creating programs such Sprint Nextel’s “Focus on Driving”, that provides to driver education. Or AT&T’s “Be Sensible: Don’t Drive Yourself to Distraction”, that supports an educational video towards safer driving.

I found this article very pertaining to my research.  It supported the fact that something needs to be done in the state of Florida by the way it states so many statistics that concur there are too many people text messaging while driving and not much is being done to change that.

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