Despite all the hoopla over texting, it remains a statistically minor cause of accidents and fatalities. Spending tens of millions of dollars preventing texting sounds like a cool idea, but the effort is misplaced. Drunk driving, despite the billions spent to prevent it, kills more people than texting. In fact, driving while sleepy kills more people than alcohol, but no one has spent a plug nickel telling people to get more sleep.

Well said. It is similar to people crying about accidental gun deaths. Also - cancer is not even in the top 5 and we are spending trillions to cure it. Diarrhoeal diseases cause more deaths and I have not received even one piece of junk mail about that.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm/Leading causes of death in the USA

Number of deaths for leading causes of death
•Heart disease: 599,413
•Cancer: 567,628
•Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
•Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
•Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
•Alzheimer's disease: 79,003
•Diabetes: 68,705
•Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
•Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
•Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909

Note, much of what brings on heart disease is preventable by the person simply taking better care of themselves.
Cancer, not so much.

So, John and Timothy, are you saying that we shouldn't try and prevent texting and driving because there are other things that kill more people? That's great advice. I'm going to tell my 5 year old to start smoking because cancer is number 2 on the death rate list. I will also advise her to start collecting plug nickels.

Do not underestimate the effects of texting on drivers paying attention to the highway and other drivers (including drunk drivers). I am not minimizing how deadly drunk and impaired drivers are on the roads. I am 100% on board. However, with this texting issue, which is getting worse all over the country, bring attention to the problem makes sense. In New Jersey, we passed a law against talking on the cell phone while driving. It should be a law in every state. Even luxury autos with the hands-free cell phone and voice recognition texting should be illegal, because it has proved people's concentration is still diverted from job 1, Driving safely. It is not like having a passenger in the car talking, because a passenger sometimes is the person who warns the driver to watch out for some hazard my cell phone never did that for me.

I trust everyone agrees that texting while driving is dangerous. Kudos to mobile phone providers for wanting to make the use of their products safer.

Other dangers receive less attention than they deserve. Still others receive more attention then they deserve - though, personally, I wouldn't put cancer in that category.

To my mind, those are not reasons to fault mobile phone providers for their safety efforts.

You make excellent points Peter. After reading your comment, I can hardly wait for I-phone 9 (Ha, Ha,)

Sat at a green light this morning behind, yet another, ignorant fool who can't put the dang phone down while they're operating a vehicle. It's irresponsible and dangerous yes, but it's also very inconsiderate and an attribute to, whay I consider, an over-whelming sense of enititlement and self importance; a lack of respect for anyone else, if you will.

There could be another story and another topic about cell phone etiquette or lack thereof. What is so important that cell phone users have to disturb others in restaurants with load chatter, or on public transportation, or holding up an entire flight, because some ignorant %$#@# won't get off the cell phone per FAA reg an allow us to take off on our destination? The list goes on ad-nauseum, but it all comes back to entitlement, and when they rear end your car... they look at you like if you were not there, none of this would have happened.

SPAM comment deleted.

Now that the government can break into your phone through the emergency broadcasting system, it's just a matter of time before they start bombarding us with annoying public service announcements about this subject.