You’re cruisin’ down the road, mindin’ your own business, you’re trying to find the way to your meeting, so you pull up your smartphone and search for directions.  Still, you get confused, so you call up the office asking the exact address.  After you get it, you remember that it’s you’re best friend’s birthday and you just have to greet him on Facebook, so you pull up your smartphone again to do the task.  Then… BAM!  The next thing you know, you’re sitting on the side of the road, disoriented, people fussing over you and you look around and start to think, “WTF just happened?!”  It takes you a few seconds to realize that you’ve been in a car accident.

Gruesome, I know, but you get the picture, right?  In driver’s ed, we were taught to never take our eyes off the road, even for just a split second.  That’s all the time needed for an accident to occur.  No matter how careful you are or how great a driver you are, there are still reckless drivers out there, and they’re like time bombs on wheels.

And this exact scenario is what the National Transportation Safety Board wants to address: how you are putting yourself, as well as other motorists at risk by using your mobile device while driving.  They aim to ban mobile device use while driving.

“Every year, new devices are being released,” NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said. “People are tempted to update their Facebook page, they are tempted to tweet, as if sitting at a desk. But they are driving a car.”

Hersman stated that motor accidents because of mobile devices are increasing dramatically, alongside the flourishing number of high-end mobile devices that allow users to not only send text and receive calls, but to also update their Facebook status, tweet, send/receive e-mail etc.  Such activities put motorists at risk.

NTSB is encouraging all US states to impose a total ban, except for emergencies, following the recent deadly crashes, including one in Missouri after a teenager sent or received 11 text messages within 11 minutes

“We’re not here to win a popularity contest,” Hersman said. “No email, no text, no update, no call is worth a human life.”

But Senator Tracey Eide,  a Federal Way Democra, stated that, “I don’t see it happening anytime soon.  I drive two hours a day to and from Olympia, and I still see people using cellphones and texting,” Eide said. “It’s a societal issue. People have to come to terms with how dangerous it is.”

Some motorists are overly confident about their mobile handling skills, believing they are the master of multitasking.  But an accident is an accident, no matter how careful you are, a complete idiot could turn your world upside down.

“This (distracted driving) is becoming the new DUI. It’s becoming epidemic,” said NTSB member Robert Sumwalt.

A study done by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that a safety-critical event is 163 times more likely if a driver is texting, e-mailing or accessing the Internet because his full concentration is not the road..

“Needless lives are lost on our highways, and for what? Convenience? Death isn’t convenient,” Hersman said. “So we can stay more connected? A fatal accident severs that connection.”