There are always exceptions (Score 0)

Personally, I think texting while driving in some situations is ok. While of course there's no way to determine which situations are ok and which aren't, it still doesn't change that that in comparison to other things, texting while driving really isn't that dangerous. For example. Checking your mirrors can be more hazardous than texting, and this is why. When I text, it takes next to no brain power for me to keep tabs on what I'm trying to say, what the other person said, etc. moving my thumb and pushing the right buttons to form words is a mindless activity. I've always texted by letting my thumb move across the keyboard to the approximate location of the next letter I wish to enter just by muscle memory. an while driving, it only takes a glance, perhaps a quarter of a second long, to confirm that my thumb is indeed over the correct button. Or, if it is not, then that glance would have been enough to show me where the correct button is in relation to my thumb, and I'll still be able to press it. The point is, if I'm texting while driving, I'm dedicating about as much brainpower to texting as is required to tie my shoes. In short, the mental concentration really isn't going to affect my driving. My second point is that my eyes hardly ever leave the road, and that's about just as unlikely to be the source of a driving incident. Which is why I say checkign your mirrors can be more dangerous than texting. CAN be. NOt necessarily is, but can be. If you take more than half a second to look in your mirrors, for whatever reason, then your eyes are off the road more than mine are when I'm texting. My experience has shown that it is quite common for people to be examining their mirrors for a full 3 seconds or so without lookig at the road. That can be either lookign form mirror to mirror, or inspecting somehtign in a single mirror quite thoroughly. There's a lot of things I could get into, sort of like the example I just gave, but in short, any small task while driving can be dangerous. Changing the radio station, stretching your neck, checkign the time... many of these things either take more concentration or force your eyes away from the road for longer than when I'm texting. My texting is really not very dangerous. at all. if I get into a car accident while texting, it'll be because a drunk driver or a deer or SOMEHTING jumped out in front of the road in an incredibly short amount of time, and I would not have been able to avoid it even if I had been lookign at the road the whole time. For the record, I spent probobaly 50 hours texting behind the wheel this summer. there were only maybe 10 incidents where my car got close to the edge of the road, and maybe 2 of those times, a wheel went off. But I was already lookign back up at the road and correcting my error. and all those incidents happened on back country roads where nobody is walking around anyway. Once, maybe twice did I get closer to the car in front of me because they were braking harder than normal and I noticed slightly later than I normally would have, but it still was plenty far away to be plenty safe enough. If we add up all the seconds that my driving was worse than normal, and put it up against all the time I spent texting and driving, we get an approximate ratio of 1 minute to 3000. SO firstly, the chances of anythgin happening are slim, but the chances of somehtign significant or serious happenign are currently less than the chances of being struck by lightning. For me, that is a perfectly acceptable risk. Buuut, most people don't text like I do. Which is why there have been accidents, and deaths, and all that, resulting in this legistaltion in Utah. because the overall chances of somethign happenign are much larger. And while there are exeptions such as myself, there is no practical way that I can think of to determine whether or not an individual was practicing 'safe texting' or not. SO in a sense, it's really all moot. But, what if soethign was put in place to teach people how to text as safely as possible while driving? If we try to teach kids to practice safe sex, then we could teach them to safely text while driving too. Or perhaps a more apporpriate analogy is how heroin addicts are taught how to get clean needles and take drugs safely too. It happens. And I'm sure you can see it, and I can definitely feel it, so I'll say it. All of what I've said here doesn't really amount to anythign. So I don't really have much of a point. BUt I'm just kinda sayin'. it IS possible to text and drive without killing everyone around you. but most people who text and drive are a hazard. So I wanna make it clear that I'm not trying to make it legal. Keep it illegal. buuut, there are alternatives. Kinda. I guess.... well, ok. How about this. By replying here and typing all of this, I'm trying to convince people that there are exceptions. I'm talking to the people who generalize and clump people together. I'm talkign to the people who assume that jsut because you text and drive, you WILL kill someone, without exception. There are some people who believe that it is absolutely impossible to avoid crashing into stuff left and right if you're texting while driving. And they don't even consider an alternative. So I'm here to say that there IS an exception, and it IS possible. So there. Ha. can you tell I did this all on the spot? Improvised the whole thing? And that I'm a pretty informal guy?"