This Just In From the N.S. Sherlock Institute for the Bleeding Obvious…
…drivers who text while at the wheel are more likely to have accidents than those paying attention to the road ahead.
In fact, according to a new $6 million dollar study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, texting while driving increases your chances of crashing by 23 times (see table below; click to enlarge).
Apparently, drivers take their eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds when composing text messages–enough time at typical highway speeds to wreak all manner of havoc.
“Texting should be banned in moving vehicles for all drivers,” the study concludes, adding that it “has the potential to create a true crash epidemic if texting-type tasks continue to grow in popularity and the generation of frequent text message senders reach driving age in large numbers.”
We need a $6 million study to tell us this? Why hasn’t texting while driving been banned already?