More than one-third of drivers in Maryland and Virginia admit they have gotten into the dangerous habit of texting while driving.
Drivers in the two states are some of the worst offenders in the nation, with 36 percent of Maryland drivers and 35.6 percent of Virginia drivers admitting they let their fingers do the talking when they’re on the road, according to a new survey.
The states ranked fourth and sixth in the country, respectively, for taking their hands off the wheel to type messages to their friends, according to a survey by voice-recognition software company Vlingo.
The District of Columbia was not ranked. Text messaging has been blamed for some high-profile car accidents in recent years, including a 2007 crash in western New York that killed five teenagers who had graduated from high school days before.
Investigators found that texts messages had been sent back and forth from the 17-year-old driver’s cell phone just before her car slammed into a truck head-on, killing her and all of her passengers. While the effects of cell phone use have been well-documented as hurting driving skills, research is just beginning into the specific effects of texting.
A study by University of Utah psychology professor Frank Drews found drivers are 50 percent more likely to have an accident when they are texting than when they are talking on a cell phone. A driver’s chance of having an accident increases fourfold when he is talking on the phone and sixfold when he or she is texting, according to the study, which tested college students in controlled driving environments.
“We found thattheir ability to respond to a car that was braking ahead of them was significantly impaired,” Drews said. “They were much, much slower than people who were not text messaging.”
Texters took 1.07 seconds to react to a braking vehicle in front of them while non-texters took 0.88 seconds — a difference that Drew said can have a significant effect when traveling at high speeds. Nationally, 28 percent of all cell phone users said they send text messages while driving, but that number jumped significantly for younger drivers — 50 percent of teenagers and 52 percent of 20- to 29-year-olds said they partake. Only Washington state and New Jersey have laws that explicitly ban text messaging while driving, while 16 states have similar laws pending, according to AAA.
Virginia has a statewide ban on hand-held cell phone use but no specific text messaging ban, and Maryland bans cell phone use for teen drivers, though the law can be enforced only if the teen is pulled over for another driving violation.
