No matter where you happen to live, using your phone while driving is generally going to be frowned upon as a horrible idea and rightly so; distracted driving in all forms is responsible for numerous accidents around the world, with many of those being fatal. While texting and driving is a rather new target, seeing its rise as the smartphone gained popularity and brought the world into a new connected era, it has received a much stronger response than any other form of distracted driving to date, from speaking to your passengers or eating to trying to organize spreadsheets while shooting down the highway to a distant business meeting. In many places, using a mobile device in any capacity at all while driving is outright illegal, carrying fairly stiff penalties.
Even with legal penalties imposed in most cases, texting and driving is still quite an issue. While self-driving cars are well on the way into public availability, until the day they’re available to civilians, officials will have to focus on ensuring safe driving habits are strictly adhered to. In keeping with the times, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of America has adopted a new policy regarding the practice. People who are found to be texting and driving will be called out on the NHTSA’s Twitter page. Whether the Administration is joining in on a conversation about a reckless texting driver, talking about the practice in general, or even publicly shaming confessed texting drivers, they’ve been quite active about the topic.
Recent Tweets called users out and told them that it’s not worth it, or advising a college student that Snapchatting while driving, unlike a certain photography-themed video game, requires you to control the vehicle you’re in, which should take priority over taking pictures. Another Tweet, replying to somebody complaining about a fellow driver who was displaying poor text-driving skills, assured that there is no such thing as being good at texting and driving and that it simply shouldn’t be done. All of the Tweets are given the hashtag #justdrive, implying that driving should be an entirely focused activity. While there are numerous appropriate uses for a mobile device behind the wheel, such as music, navigation and hands-free calls, most of those can be accomplished without physically looking at the device or taking your hands off the wheel these days, thanks to tools like Google Now.