Don’t yield on texting issue; distracted driving must stop

The National Safety Council reports that cellphone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year.

More than 390,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers in 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports.

One out of every four car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.

Texting while driving is six times more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.

Of all cellphone related tasks, texting is by far the most dangerous activity.

When the NHTSA conducted its 2012 National Survey on Distracted Driving Attitudes and Behaviors, 94 percent of drivers supported a ban on texting while driving.

Researchers at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park estimate more than 3,000 annual teen deaths nationwide from texting and 300,000 injuries.

If the Florida Legislature hasn’t the gumption to stop this lethal behavior of texting while driving, I suggest a statewide movement that encourages every driver who sees another driver texting while driving to blow his or her horn repeatedly until such time as the individual texting stops texting. Perhaps this message will go viral and many lives will be saved and automobile crashes and injuries precluded.

Who knows, perhaps it will even embarrass our gutless legislators to enact the appropriate measures they should have done years ago. Robert Fox, Lake Worth