In January of this year Illinois Tollway released a survey of tollway users and found that 40 percent of the users did not know it is illegal to text or email at any time when driving on Illinois roads.
In 2009, 26 percent of Americans ages 16 and 17 said they had texted while driving, according to a survey of 800 teens ages 12-17 done by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. However, for Americans ages 12 to 17, 48 percent said they had been in a car when the driver was texting, and males and females are equally likely to report texting behind the wheel, the research stated.
Future texting technology
Free cell phone applications like PhoneGuard that disable a phone’s texting functions when there is movement of more than 10 miles per hour, have been introduced for smart phones, but they can be easily uninstalled by users who can’t seem to fight the urge to text and drive.
That urge is becoming far too common, Nika says. The driver education teacher can’t even convince his own family members to put their phones down when they’re in the car together. And when Nika approached his former driver education students to ask if they are still texting, the response they gave only further concerned him.
“The whole class laughed at me,” Nika says. “They said of course we are.”
To Nika, effective enforcement of the law against texting while driving will only take place when all handheld phone use while driving is made illegal because spotting a driver with a phone would be easier for law enforcement to recognize.
“We’ve got to get the phones out of people’s hands,” Nika says. “That’s my simple solution.”
Hannah Douglas of Springfield, a summer graduate of Truman State University in communications, researched and wrote this article while working as a summer intern at Illinois Times. She is now pursuing her journalism career in San Francisco.
For more local information and resources on texting while driving, visit www.cyberdriverillinois.com. The driving simulator through SADD is free and available to any person or group. Contact [email protected] to find out more.
