The Good Samaritan’s Smartphone and the Law of Love

The statistics are as clear as a red stoplight on a dark night.Talking on the phone while driving makes you 4-times more likely to get into an accident.

Texting while driving makes you 23-times more likely to get into an accident.

Driving is inherently visual; talking and listening is not. We can talk to others and drive with little impairment. But because texting is visual, “doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task” (source).

Which is why the reaction time of texting-distracted drivers is slowed by 35% compared with non-distracted drivers, an impairment greater than that of alcohol and marijuana intoxication combined (source).

To make this more concrete, in the average time it takes us to send a text (4.6 seconds), at 55 MPH, we drive blindly the length of a football field. Then we unknowingly drive through a post-text daze called “inattention blindness,” which means it takes several more seconds of looking out the windshield before our minds finally refocus on the road.

Texting and driving is so stupid and dangerous, 46 states have banned it.

So you would think these facts would deter people from making this drastically reckless decision.

It doesn’t.

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Source: The Good Samaritan’s Smartphone and the Law of Love | Desiring God