Stop Texting and Driving...There's an App for That! 

Every time you turn around you are hearing of great new apps.  There are apps for just about everything you can think of from finding great restaurants to following sports play by play.  After recently learning of a brand new app I felt obliged to share this information as it may be one of the best apps for drivers yet.

A recent study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that distracted driving was the leading cause in 448,000 accidents and 5,474 highway deaths in 2009, a 16% increase from 2008.  For every 6 seconds of drive time, a driver sending or receiving a text message spends 4.6 of those seconds with their eyes off the road. This makes texting the most distracting of all cell phone related tasks. Texting while driving is about 6 times more likely to result in an accident than driving while intoxicated. These numbers are expected to be even higher than the prior year’s numbers once they become available for 2010 and 2011. 

 Lucky for us technology is on our side.  There is an application available for your Smartphone from the people at iSpeech that will help “keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel” to quote Jim Morrison and the Doors. New services – like http://www.drivesafe.ly/ – have sprung up that eliminate the need to read text messages as well as the need to respond.

Here's how it works… You download an application to your phone. Then, when you get ready to drive, you turn the application on. When you receive a text message, the application automatically reads it to you. After it reads the message, the app sends an automatic response that informs whomever is texting you that you are driving and you will respond as soon as it is safe to do so.

After researching you will find that there are two options available.  There is a free option and a pay option. 

There is also a family package available for $34.95 annually.  As with most other apps I would recommend trying out the free version first, but really $13.95 a year seems like a small price to pay to help you avoid an accident that could result in injury or worse.

Sources:

http://www.drivesafe.ly/

http://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/cell-phone/statistics.html