I did a report on actual studies of this for college. It is part of a category of behaviors referred to as “distracted driving,” a category which includes driving while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
The reason drunk driving is bad is you have inhibited judgment and a depressed nerve response. If you are drunk driving, and there’s something you need to avoid or react to, you are more likely to make bad reactive decisions, and make them much slower than a sober person would. (I do not recall offhand the name for the type of distraction this represents neurologically.)
Looking at your phone is something called a COGNITIVE distraction, which means your focus, in that moment, is entirely on a separate task, because contrary to popular belief, “multitasking” is not a thing that actually exists neurologically. It is possible to switch between multiple tasks in such a way that you make progress towards both at nearly the same time, but within the same INSTANT, your brain CANNOT, by design, perform two cognitive tasks at the same time without greatly impairing your performance at both of them. Even talking on the phone while driving, keeping your eyes fully on the road at all times, is a cognitive distraction that makes it much harder for you to pay attention to your driving and to the people around you, and even people who claimed to be proficient multitaskers, when tested, proved to be highly prone to accidents while talking on the phone AND far less effective at responding to the conversations they were having, because it is not possible for the human brain to do both things at the same time. Talking on the phone while driving was found to be approximately as bad as drunk driving.
If you are traveling at highway speeds, and you look down at your phone for just six seconds, you will have traveled roughly the distance of an American football field while your eyes were completely away from the road.
This, obviously, is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
A person under the influence of alcohol will have a DELAYED reaction. A person whose eyes are not on the road because they are texting will have NO reaction. In the event of an accident, this means full speed collision head on with no actions taken to mitigate the damage.
What every study ever done on the subject showed, unambiguously and by a CLEAR margin, was that TEXTING WHILE DRIVING IS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER MOTORISTS THAN DRUNK DRIVING. You are both more likely to be INVOLVED in an accident and less likely to REACT to it in time to save your life and the lives of other people on the road.
Drunk driving is punished HEAVILY by law, and rightly so, because it is a reckless endangerment of public safety.
If you text while driving or check facebook while driving or do anything else on your phone instead of keeping your eyes on the road, YOU ARE MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER DRIVERS THAN A PERSON WHO IS SEVERELY DRUNK, YOU ARE A THREAT TO PUBLIC SAFETY AND YOU SHOULD BE STOPPED. Other people on the road have every right to hate you for it and to hope someday the law catches up on this issue.
If you’re driving on the same road as me, YOU TEXTING IS MY FUCKING BUSINESS, because you are putting MY LIFE in danger.
If you want to text while in transit, you shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.
