WAVE 3 TV Louisville, KY | Driving while texting: a dangerous practice

Driving while texting: a dangerous practice

By Chris McGill - bio | email

LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - Just about everyone nowadays has a cell phone. And almost all of them will allow you to also send text messages. But have you ever thought about just how dangerous it is to use that everyday device while driving your car?

"It's getting to be a bigger issue for us all," said Lt. David Jude with the Kentucky State Police when describing the problem of texting and driving.

As Jude explains, texting while behind the wheel is a dangerous activity.

"To take your attention off the roadway, take your hands off the wheel and not pay attention so you can text somebody, really makes it a dangerous situation for everybody on the roadway," Jude said.

That danger made national news when Louisvillian Nicole Meredith was featured in Seventeen Magazine because she had a wreck and totaled her car while texting. However, it appears to be a habit that many drivers are picking up - not just teens.

"Adults now are texting more and more, so this issue is widespread no matter the age group that we're talking about," Jude said. "It's very important for us to get that down and just get people to pay attention to what they're doing."

According to Jude, 40 percent of the wrecks in the state of Kentucky are due to driver inattention, and Jude says texting is certainly part of the problem. But as of now, there's no law against it, at least not in Kentucky. Only a handful of states in the U.S. have laws against texting and driving, especially for juveniles, but Indiana does.

"Indiana passed a law that says anyone under the age of 18 years of age is not allowed to have any type of electronic device operating while they're driving," said Sgt. Jerry Goodin with the Indiana State Police.

He says although there is a law against it, roughly 46 percent of juvenile drivers in Indiana have admitted to texting while driving.

"We're stopping teenagers that are doing these things, talking on their phones texting and everything," Jude said. "And a lot of these teenagers they have to remember they are on a probationary license so it's an enhanced offense for them to get caught doing this."

Goodin says law enforcement is planning to take things a step further. If an officer feels a crash is caused by someone using a phone while driving, they could subpoena their phone records.

"We're going to go back and we're going to start searching these records and we're going to start making people be accountable for the crashes they're causing because of driver inattention," Goodin said. 

According to Goodin, it only takes three to five seconds to send a text, "and depending on what speed you're going, you could travel the distance of a football field in that time period and if you're not looking at the road, think of the danger that you're causing other people that's out there on the roadway."

I put myself to the test in the Kentucky Office of Highway Safety's "Distracted Driving Simulator."

I was instructed to send a text message with my phone while driving. When I noticed the stop sign pop up on the TV monitor, I was to stop as quickly as possible. My reaction time while texting was 1.6 seconds - a potentially deadly delay.

Shane Ratliff, Young Drivers Program Manager for the Office of Highway Safety, said that my car traveled "159.4 four feet from the time the stop sign came up - which could have been a child running out in the road, a deer, a cow, a car stopping in front of you - you would have taken the car out!"

It would appear to be a no brainer: texting and driving is as dangerous as driving drunk. If you absolutely need to send a text while in the car, Sgt. Goodin says simply pull off the road in a safe area.

If you don't, "and you happen to have a crash and you would kill a family or you would kill a child or kill anyone while you were driving while texting, that would be a terrible thing to have to face for the rest of your life."

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