Thursday is Drive 4 Pledges Day, the day four cell phone companies want people to promise not to text while driving. It’s part of their national It Can Wait campaign.
"Texting while driving claims too many lives, and raising awareness of this completely preventable tragedy is key to saving them,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said in a press release. “We’ve seen success before through our seatbelts and our drunk driving campaigns, and I both applaud the It Can Wait campaign for its efforts to raise awareness and encourage everyone to make a commitment on Drive 4 Pledges Day to drive focused and distraction-free."
If you or your loved ones haven’t gotten the message about the dangers of texting while driving, a 30-second video will bring it home.
“Today she would have been 19-years-old exactly,” one mother said.
The sister of a young woman who died while reading her sister’s text was in tears as she talked about the pain of knowing she was the person she was talking to when she died.
“I sent one stupid meaningless text and killed a man,” a young man who hit a person on a bicycle said.
Locally AT&T will have a pedal and wheel simulator at its Crown Bay, St. Thomas, office so people can experience firsthand the dangers of driving while texting. It will be available from noon to 3 p.m. Thursday.
“Our store employees also will be encouraging store visitors to take the It Can Wait pledge to never text while driving again,” said Kelly Layne Starling, AT&T’s regional public relations manager.
Aspiring to create a social stigma around the dangerous habit of texting while driving, Drive 4 Pledges Day will focus on getting individuals involved in taking the pledge to never text and drive while encouraging others in their community to do the same.
On Thursday, participants will be encouraged to do things like change their social profile photos and banner to It Can Wait graphics and share their personal pledge stories using the hashtag #ItCanWait. All materials such as social graphics and posters will be available for download from www.ItCanWait.com.
The campaign is sponsored by AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
AT&T provided some statistics gleaned from various sources. For starters, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study showed that texting drivers are 23 times more likely to be in an accident.
The website www.distraction.gov indicated that sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for 4.6 seconds. At 55 mph, that’s like driving the length of an entire football field, blindfolded.
A survey by www.connectsafely.org, a website dedicated to helping people navigate the Internet in a safe manner, found that 75 percent of teens say texting while driving is common among their friends.
However, individuals who speak up can have a profound impact, particularly on teens.
The survey found that 78 percent of teen drivers say they’re likely not to text and drive if friends tell them it’s wrong or stupid. Ninety percent say they’d stop if a friend in the car asked them to. A total of 93 percent of teens said they would stop if a parent in the car asked them to. And 44 percent say that they would be thankful if a passenger complained about their texting while driving.
The It Can Wait movement is making a difference. One-in-three people who’ve seen the texting while driving message say they’ve changed their driving habits, the campaign has inspired more than 2.5 million pledges never to text and drive.
To take the pledge and get more information, visit www.ItCanWait.com.
Watch the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjc_0JBlRgE&list=PL7FEF61DA1F5293A0&index=68.
