Danger Of Texting While Driving From A Personal Injury Attorney's Perspective

KANSAS CITY, MO, July 14, 2012

It is not an unfamiliar concept that engaging in two cognitively consuming tasks at once can cause us to be less attentive to one or both tasks. Most of us remember receiving distracted, one-word answers from our parents when we were growing up and asked them questions while they read, spoke on the phone, or performed some other simple task. This difficulty with multi-tasking becomes more important when one of the tasks requires our full attention, especially when inattentiveness can cause a devastating or even fatal car accident. This is exactly the problem we face when tempted to write or respond to a text message while driving.

However, not only intuition tells us that texting while driving is dangerous. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver distraction accounted for 5,800 deaths in the year 2008, making up 16% of fatal crashes in America that year. In addition, 21% of injury causing automobile crashes are the result of driver distraction, accounting for 515,000 injured.

A further startling statistic is that over 50% of teens admit to texting while driving, according to the American Automobile Association. Also, a study run by Hosking and colleagues in 2009 stated that young inexperienced drivers who sent text messages while driving spent four times less time looking at the road than drivers who were not text messaging. As a result, this decreased stability within the driver's lane.

There are many other studies and statistics supporting the notion that already seems quite clear from an understanding of human nature: choosing not to wait to read and send texts until you are safely off the road greatly increases your chances of injuring yourself and others.

At Adler & Manson, our Kansas City personal injury attorneys fight for the rights of the accident victims. Sadly, most of our clients were injured as a result of someone else's negligence, which could include texting while driving. If you or someone you know is in the practice of texting while driving, please make sure that they know the severe risk at which they are putting both themselves and other innocent drivers on the road. If you or someone you know was injured in an accident as a result of texting while driving or another form of negligence, contact Adler & Manson injury attorneys for a free, no obligation evaluation.

Website: http://www.adlerandmanson.com