Texting While Driving: It’s Worse Than You Think [Infographic]

When we first started texting on our cell phones, we all had the physical QWERTY keyboard to play around with. It was more or less a science to learn the whole metric around the two click way of getting a “b” for example. Some people became so fast at typing that when touchscreens came along, they were kind of lost. Their skills were no longer applicable, and they didn’t impress anyone anymore. Instead you had to type on the virtual keyboard to type your message. Touchscreens brought along with them some much needed innovation that would inject more usability when it came to smartphones. Apps could be developed and more robust and intelligent operation systems could be hosted on what before could, at best, hold a calculator.

We quickly started finding all kinds of weird places and situations when we just shouldn’t text at all. One such situation is of course when we are driving. For some people, this is still nothing they consider dangerous. They keep texting while driving and thinking they have 100% control over the situation, but they don’t. Did you know that when driving at speeds up to 55 miles per hour you are traveling the length of a football field every 5 seconds? That also happens to be the average amount of time it takes for you to take your eyes off the road, look at your smartphone, and then look back at the road again.

This should be an example enough to scare anyone, right? Nope. People still think they can better their skills by holding the phone closer to the windshield, texting at stops or red lights, and even increasing their following distance. The latter is as crazy as thinking that just because there are rails on a bridge you can stop holding the steering wheel altogether. It’s not the following distance that is your main problem, it’s the unexpected things that can happen that are your greatest threat. What if a deer runs out in the middle of the road? Your following distance is then the least of your problems, right?

You would think that as we grow older, these things would make much more sense, but apparently they don’t. A new infographic created by Quinstreet for Online Shools clearly shows that adults are as clueless about texting and driving as teenagers are. This infographic, called Driving While Intexicated, is yet another important reminder that texting while driving is lethal, not only to yourself, but also to everyone around you. Not only are we selfishly thinking it will only affect us, but we are the personification of stupidity by thinking we are better than others at doing it. It’s the same for everyone. If you don’t keep your eyes on the road and pay full attention to what’s going on, you simply aren’t driving safely. Simple as that. There’s no getting around it.

Our suggestion to all of you is to stay off that phone while you drive. Save lives and instead feel like a hero for not using your phone in these situations. It’s far more cool to drive without texting than to try and look cool texting while driving. I think a whole bunch of you will agree with us when we say that, right?

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