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With all the silliness of April Fool’s Day out of the way, it’s time to get serious for a bit. April is national Distracted Driving Awareness month, so we wanted to highlight the importance of keeping your eyes off your phone and on the road.
We may sound like a broken record, but distracted driving has become a big problem in our society today. 3,208 lives were lost in 2024 due to distracted driving while 315,167 people were injured as a result1. As a wireless provider, we feel it is our responsibility to help spread awareness of the dangers of texting/using your phone while driving. Even though our business model revolves around selling our customers phones and service for those phones, we want them to use them responsibly. No text, email, TikTok video, or Snapchat story is worth taking your eyes off the road and risking hurting yourself or others. These dangers can be especially hard for teenagers to avoid as our younger generations tend to use and rely on their devices more. According to a survey conducted by The Zebra, “There were significant generational differences with 55% of Gen Z and Millenial drivers admitting to texting and driving compared to 43% of Gen X drivers and 33% of Boomer drivers.2” Also, being a teenager means still being new to driving and accidents can happen much easier so when you add phones to the picture, it is a recipe for disaster. In 2024, 186 of the deaths from distraction related accidents were teenagers3. It is such a harrowing statistic as these people had their whole live ahead of them only to be cut short by something as simple as paying more attention to their phone than the road.
Here at Nex-Tech Wireless, we want to do what we can to help our young people stay off their phones while driving, which is why every year we provide our W8T 2 TXT program. W8T 2 TXT is a distracted driving awareness program that we present at local high schools, driver's ed programs, etc. We have a presentation that explains the dangers of texting and driving to help make things easier on parents and educators. It also includes an interactive texting and driving simulation that is fun, while also showing how hard (and dangerous) texting and driving can be. We offer this program completely FREE to help keep our communities safe. If you're interested in having us present at your school or event, please fill out the Distracted Driving Awareness Program form.
While teens are at an increased risk for accidents because of their lack of experience with driving, adults are not immune to the dangers of driving distracted. At every W8T 2 TXT event we have hosted in the past, our team has always asked if any of the kids in the class have been in a vehicle as a passenger while the adult driving (usually a parent) had been using their phone. Unfortunately, there has never been a class where no one raised their hands. In fact, usually a good handful of the students raise their hands, with some even stating they have confronted their parents about this but nothing has changed. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, “about 97% of drivers perceived scrolling through social media, 94% perceived texting or emailing, and 90% perceived reading on a hand-held phone as extremely or very dangerous. Despite these perceptions, 11% reported scrolling through social media, 28% reported sending a text or email, and 37% reported reading one while driving4.”
While this topic isn't very fun and we wish all of this was some elaborate April Fool's joke, it unfortunately is not. While it would be nice not having to talk about this subject, it is the hard truth that is is necessary. In a perfect world, distracted driving wouldn't be an issue. So, this Distracted Driving Awareness month and going forward, let's all do our part to spread the word and stay off our phones while driving!
Citations:
NHTSA - Distracted Driving
NHTSA - Teen Distracted Driver Data
The Zebra - Texting and Driving Statistics
AAA FTS - 2024 Traffic Safety Culture Index
