Texting at wheel 'is worse than drink or drugs'
TEXTING at the wheel is three times as dangerous as driving after a drink, according to motoring experts.
And reading or sending phone texts while driving is more dangerous than being high on cannabis.
[>
Yet nearly half of all young drivers – the group most likely to have a fatal crash – admit to texting while on the road.[>
[>
The RAC Foundation yesterday called for an urgent high-profile campaign to warn motorists that texting and driving puts them, their passengers and other road users at “unacceptable risk”.[>
[>
It tested the effect of writing, reading or ignoring text messages at the wheel among motorists aged 17-24. The trials, at the Transport Research Laboratory’s driving simulator, showed that reaction times of texters plunged by 35 per cent compared to 12 per cent for drivers at the legal drink limit.[>
A motorist who is texting is significantly more impaired than a motorist at the legal limit for alcohol
[>
Drivers who had taken cannabis had 21 per cent slower reaction times – much better than texters. Steering control was 91 per cent worse for drivers who were texting compared to 35 per cent for cannabis users.[>
[>
As a result texters were far more likely to drift in and out of lanes and found it difficult to maintain a safe distance.[>
[>
Research has already shown that using a mobile phone, even with a legal hands-free kit, is more dangerous than drinking and driving.[>
[>
But most telephone-related road safety campaigns have ignored the problems of texting. Yet 5,000 texts are sent every second in the UK and, according to the RAC, many are sent or received while at the wheel.[>
[>
Yet a loophole in the law means that texting while driving might not be illegal if the phone is in a hands-free cradle.[>
[>
Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, said: “The participants in this study were almost unanimous in their view that drink-driving was the most dangerous action on the road.[>
[>
“Yet this research clearly shows that a motorist who is texting is significantly more impaired than a motorist at the legal limit for alcohol.”[>
[>
The study found that a text message took an average of 22 seconds to write at a desk but 63 seconds at the wheel, by which time a car could have travelled half a mile, or more than a mile on a motorway.[>
[>
In the past two years in Britain, two people have been killed by motorists sending or reading texts while driving. [>
