This topic is news worthiness because you can almost guarantee that everywhere you go through out the day people are using technology like cellphones to communicate with people, so the number of people this impacts is huge. A Wireless survey from 2010 said that 285 million Americans are mobile subscribers, making that more than 91 percent of the total population. This will always be relevant whether of not in the future the technology or the way we communicate changes; we will always have some way to communicate with each other. Also with people becoming less impatient to wait till they are done driving to read the text they just received and possibly replying to it, it is coming a safety issue. I would say that each time I'm driving I see at least one person texting while operating a vehicle, if not more. So by informing people that police are now on the look out, it might make people think twice before picking up that phone, and realizing that it probably isn't anything urgent or that important worth the possibility of getting into a wreck.
Douglas County is starting to crack down on drivers that are texting. Officers were given the "okay" to ticket people texting while driving at the beginning of this year. Since then officers have only given eight tickets for texting and driving. In those cases 3/4 of them were given after a wreck, where the driver admitted to texting right before the crash.
As of last week, it is reporter there were 15 tickets given out. Some states have gone with a strategy of ticketing more so, to get the point across. Josh Kauffman, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation says “We feel it’s been successful in getting the word out,”. In the state of Illinois the number of tickets and warnings given out for texting were over 900, in 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment