It’s a question many Illinois drivers have likely asked themselves. Is texting while driving as harmful as it seems? After all, plenty of people check their messages at lights or scroll through their playlists for music to listen to while driving, right?
This may be so, but that doesn’t eliminate the very real dangers of texting while driving. Digital Responsibility details the many risks that come with driving and texting at the same time, and they’re numerous. If you text while driving, you increase your chances of getting into a crash by a phenomenal 23 times. This is a particularly strong danger for teens, who are over four times more likely to have a near-miss or accident because of phones than their older driving counterparts.
Another common factoid is the fact that it takes 5 seconds going at 55 miles per hour to travel the length of an entire football field. This is the average amount of time you can expect to spend with your eyes away from the road just by simply reading a text. Trying to reply will take your attention away for even longer, increasing your distance of blind travel as well as your chance of crashing.
This isn’t even mentioning the involvement of texts in high-injury or sometimes fatal crashes. 18 percent of injury-causing accidents several years ago were caused by texting while driving. Not only do you increase your chances of crashing if you text and drive, but you also increase your chances of crashing badly enough to be injured. In short, texting while driving really is dangerous.