Adults text more than teens while behind the while, a new survey has found. It dispels the commonly held notion than teens text more than adults.
There has been a lot of education directed at high school students and young adults to prevent them from texting while driving, but according to the suvey from AT&T, adults are the worse offenders.
“Commuters are texting and driving even more than teens – 49 percent, compared to 43 percent,” AT&T said Thursday. “And the problem has gotten worse. Six in 10 commuters say they never texted while driving three years ago.”
Forty-three percent of adult respondents said texting and driving was a “habit,” the company said. And nearly all the adults said they know it’s wrong to text while driving.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Charlene Lake, AT&T’s senior vice president-public affairs, told USA Today about the survey’s figures. “It was sobering to realize that texting while driving by adults is not only high, it’s really gone up in the last three years.”
In the United States, 39 states and Washington D.C. ban texting while driving, and five other states ban the practice for beginning drivers.
“Texting while driving is not just a teen problem,” John Ulczycki of the National Safety Council, told the paper. “Teens text. But you’re looking at around 10 million teen drivers, but about 180 million other adult drivers.”
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute said that drivers who are texting are 23 times more likely to get in an accident, according to CNN.
AT&T surveyed 1,011 adult drivers in the U.S. who own mobile phones. The teen driver survey was carried out in April 2012, involving 1,200 motorists between the ages of 15 and 19.
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