Annotated Bibiliography 3 - Assignment Example

New Approaches to End Texting While Driving The issue of texting while driving is so serious that there has been introduced a new term for it, ‘intextication’, which is referred to a state when a person does not pay attention to surroundings because of being occupied with a cell phone. Intextication causes people to make mistakes, especially at the wheel; even the influence of alcohol is half as much dangerous as texting while driving. California Highway Patrol Officer Brian Pennings gives presentations for students of high schools on the danger of texting while driving because these days, teens tend to use their phones more while driving than take drugs or alcohol before driving.

Such presentations include tests for students on their abilities to drive while texting: those who want to test their abilities have to navigate around set obstacles and answer seemingly easy questions. Penning says that even though the questions are easy, they distract teens a lot and does not allow them driving properly.Very often, both adults and teens believe that they are the only ones who can perform several tasks at a time. In reality, it is not so. About 90 percent of all collisions result from distracted driving, with the majority of cases resulting from texting while driving.

The latter is more dangerous than talking on the phone or to passengers while at the wheel. As Pennings says, conversations tend to overshadow driving. Before cell phones, the problem of distraction while driving existed as drivers were talking to the passengers. Overall, when being engaged in a conversation, an average driver sees only a half of what appears in frony of him / her on the road.There is a wide range of no-texting apps for cell phones that send calls to voice mail, silence texts etc.

when inside a moving vehicle; all of them can be downloaded from the Google Play or App Store. Pennings argues that these apps will not change the situation for the better because governments cannot make citizens use them.Overall, Penning believes that using cells phones should be banned because driving itself is multitasking, and it is very important to be mentally engaged while at the wheel.The author of the article refers to the experience of a person who is directly connected to the problem of texting while driving.

Brian Pennings is an expert in his field, and his own ideas and statistical data he quotes make the source under consideration reliable and worth using in the research. In addition to this, the author of the article refers to Pennings’ ideas and discusses quite an interesting and, more importantly, innovative way of eliminating driving distractions in the form of cell phones, which is the use of apps for cell phones. This article may contribute to the part of the research in which I will discuss the dangers of texting while driving for teenagers as well as ways of changing and, if possible, eliminating the problem.

Work CitedAmerican Society of Safety Engineers. "New Approaches to End Texting While Driving." Personal Safety. September 2013: 16. Print.