Close to Half of Teens Text and Drive Despite New Laws and Ad Campaigns

Amid a high-profile public campaign and numerous laws nationwide against texting while driving, close to one-half of all teenagers say they still send and receive text messages while behind the wheel.

According to data compiled by researchers at Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York, and presented over the weekend at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Washington, D.C., an estimated 43 percent of the driving-age high-schoolers who responded to a 2011 survey confirmed they had texted while driving at least once during the previous 30 days.

National statistics say the primary cause of death among teenagers is motor vehicle accidents, while using a phone while driving a car or truck significantly increases the risk younger drivers will become involved in accidents. The risk a texting driver ends up involved in a wreck is in fact 23 times more than the normal accident rate.

"Texting while driving has become, in the words of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a 'national epidemic,'" principal investigator Alexandra Bailin, a research assistant at Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York, said in a statement.

So, even though teenagers may well be "developmentally predisposed" to taking risks,  she said, "reducing the prevalence of texting while driving is an obvious and important way to ensure the health and safety of teen drivers, their passengers and the surrounding public."

In order to determine how common texting while driving was with teenage drivers, Bailin's team looked at data collected through the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDCP conducts the survey every two years to track six types of risky behaviors among U.S. youth that contribute to the primary causes of death, disability and social problems.

The 2011 survey recorded that 7,833 high school students completed the study, which asked for the first time asked if participants had texted or sent e-mails at least once while operating a motor vehicle over the past 30 days.

"Survey results showed that males were more likely to text while driving than females (46 percent vs. 40 percent), and the prevalence of texting increased with age (52 percent of those over 18 years; 46 percent of 17-year-olds; 33 percent of 16-year-olds; and 26 percent of 15-year-olds)," the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the organizations that co-sponsor the PAS Annual Meeting, said in a statement.

"Furthermore, teens who reported texting while driving were more likely to engage in other risky behaviors such as driving under the influence of alcohol, having unprotected sex and using an indoor tanning device," the group continued. "The researchers also found that state laws banning texting while driving had little effect: 39 percent of teens reported texting in states where it is illegal vs. 44 percent of teens in states that have no restrictions."

Bailin said that she and her colleagues hope to find new, better ways to keep high-school students from texting while driving.

"Regrettably, our analysis suggests that state laws do not significantly reduce teen texting while driving," said senior investigator Andrew Adesman, head developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen.

"Technological solutions will likely need to be developed to significantly reduce the frequency of texting while driving," he said. "Phones will have to get smarter if they are to protect teens (and others) from doing dumb things."