To follow up on our recent blog post about distracted driving, we wanted to make our readers aware of a study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding distracted driving, especially among young drivers. The statistics are scary, such as an estimate based on cell-phone records indicating that cell-phone usage among drivers increases the risk of a crash by a factor of four. The study also points out that drivers between ages 15 and 20 account for 10% of all motor vehicle traffic deaths and 14% of all police-reported crashes involving injury in spite of the fact that this age group makes up only 6.4% of all drivers. Given that many young people are basically addicted to their cell phones, we are running the risk of seeing a significant increase of serious motor vehicle crashes in the years to come. So let's do everything we can now to educate our young ones about the risk of distracted driving, in particular texting while driving.
Here is a link to the article. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1204142#t=articleDiscussion