Texting while driving is a worldwide concern and young students have joined a "It Can Wait" campaign pledging to refrain from texting while behind the wheel.
A text is definitely not worth our lives. To convey the message to all drivers, AT&T and other phone carriers in the U.S. have started the national "It Can Wait" campaign. The goal is to prevent fatal accidents that are caused due to texting while driving. New tougher policies have been imposed to prevent drivers from texting while behind the wheel. Despite such laws and campaigns cases registered for mixing driving with texting are not going down.
The "It Can Wait" campaign has got an enormous response with more than 2.5 million people pledging not to text while driving. The campaign has reached out to students urging them to stop the practice because teenagers are often casual about texting while driving. Students from Whitman High School signed pledge cards Thursday to join the campaign.
According to a recent survey by AT&T, 97 percent teens are aware that texting while driving can be dangerous, yet 43 percent admitted doing it. Directing the focus on teens, AT&T also found that 78 percent teen drivers said they would stop texting while driving if their friends asked them to do so and 90 percent said they would stop if a friend in the car asked them to, according to a press release.
"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 statement. "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."
Students were also shown a ten-minute film, "The Last Text," filled with shocking images of people injured in car crashes and stories of families who had lost a loved one in such accidents.
Washington High School students also joined the campaign to be safe drivers, Saturday.
The "It Can Wait" website also has a simulator that syncs with your smartphone and asks to respond to a text message while driving virtually. It shows how dangerous it can get to the mix texting with driving.
