Distracted Driving Crash Kills 11

Distracted driving is blamed for one of Kentucky's worst traffic accidents, when a truck driver who was speeding and using a cell phone crossed the line and collided with a vehicle carrying a Mennonite family to a wedding.  The truck driver was killed along with 10 Mennonites from the other vehicle.  Read more.

Texting Increases in CA Despite Ban

"After an initial drop, texting while driving appears to be on the rise 15 months after California's texting ban was implemented, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California's latest observational roadside survey of drivers."  Read more.

** Click here to go to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety website.**

CDC Says Leading Cause of Death of Teens is Motor Vehicle Accidents

New data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows an average of 16,375 teenagers age 12-19 years died in the United States every year from 1999 to 2006; the five leading causes of death among teenagers are accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide, cancer, and heart disease. Accidents account for nearly one-half of all teenage deaths. Of those accidents, motor vehicle fatalities are the leading cause of death of teenagers, representing over one-third of all deaths.  Read more.

Distracted Driving Kills

Pew Internet & American Life Project's Report on Teens & Mobile Phones

A new report by the Pew Research Center finds that "Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months, from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008 to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And it's not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day."  Read the report here.

Grieving Parents Try to Use Tragedy to Educate Others

Heather Lerch, of Washington, was killed in a one-car crash in February.  Police reports and phone records indicated "she was texting and driving at the time of the crash.  Innocuous texts, trivial texts, "cool, let's hang out some time" kind of texts, just meaningless teenage blather that cost Heather her life and Dan and Wendy a daughter."  Now her parents are "using the tragedy to educate others about the dangers of 'distracted driving,' in particular, driving while phoning or texting."  Read more.

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