Unless you witness someone with their head looking in their lap when they strike you, it is often pretty hard to prove that someone was texting and driving at the time of an accident. This is because texts are not usually time stamped to the moment of impact and the moment of impact is usually not nailed down to a matter of minutes or seconds. To further complicate things, most people begin to frantically send texts immediately after the accident to friends and family.
Nobody writes down or notes the moment of impact. Police respond when they are called and usually note the time of accident as approximately the time they arrived on the scene.
Does this matter? Yes, because most people who are texting and cause accidents will deny texting as most people know it is illegal to text while driving.
Nevertheless, texting is often the only reasonable explanation for why an accident occurred. When an otherwise sober person causes a major accident on a clear sunny day, there are only a few explanations and distracted driving is the usual culprit.
Texting while driving causes the driver to be distracted visually, manually, and cognitively. Texting is therefore worse than eating, talking on the phone, or taking your mind off of driving all put together.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer groups are speaking at high schools throughout Pennsylvania to bring awareness of the dangers of texting while driving to our high school drivers.
As a society, we have made such progress in reducing drunk driving accidents, that to just replace those gains with texting caused accidents is a shame. If you want statistics, nearly 20% of crashes with injuries were caused by distracted driving. 3300 people were killed by distracted driving and 300,000 plus injuries were attributed to distracted driving in 2011 alone.