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Texting and driving creates chaos

By: Lindsey Wiebe

Posted: 09/30/2010 4:55 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

JOE.BRYKSA@FREEPRESS.MB.CA Enlarge Image

John Taylor student Winson Choi tries to text while driving a go cart at Thunder Rapids Fun Park Thursday.

WINNIPEG - They’re swerving in and out of their lanes, veering around and sometimes colliding into other vehicles, their eyes flickering between the road and their cell phone screens all the while.

This texting-and-driving outbreak is only an exercise, but it’s one CAA Manitoba hopes 25 city teens will take to heart.

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CAA’s driving-and-texting challenge today at Thunder Mountain Fun Park was aimed at showing students the perils of tapping away on their phones while trying to navigate cars -- or in this case, go-karts -- on the road.

The event was held to coincide with the launch of a new smart phone application, Zoomsafer, offered in partnership with CAA Manitoba and designed to disable a phone while a car is moving so the driver can’t text or call.

The John Taylor Collegiate students were first sent down the track sans phone, and then asked to weave through the pylons once more, this time while typing out all the words to Happy Birthday To You on their cells.

The end result was "much more dangerous than just driving," said 17-year-old Winson Choi, who hit a pylon during his second round on the track.

Accuracy suffered on the texting run-through, both on-screen and on the course. "They weren’t focused on the road in front of them," said Liz Peters, public and governmental affairs manager for CAA Manitoba.

Besides the typos, students were more accident-prone, and slowed down on the texting round, taking an extra minute and 20 seconds on average to complete the track. "You can’t always do that on the real road," Peters said.

Texting drivers weren’t the safest road companions, students said.

"They’re not focused, so they’ll turn into you. They don’t know you’re there," said Logan Komorofsky, 16.

Dazreen Paran, 16, admitted the course got a lot more challenging when text messaging was thrown into the mix: "It was really, really hard," said Paran, who wound up crashing her go-kart during a lane change.

Kara-Lynn Sorensen managed to send off her text with no collisions, but the 16-year-old get hit twice by two other go-karts -- including Paran’s.

CAA Manitoba says drivers aged 16 to 19 are 100 times more likely to get into an accident than drivers 45 years of age or older.

The organization is billing Zoomsafer, the new phone application, as a way to improve road safety for young drivers. The app can hook up with an in-vehicle Bluetooth system or use a phone’s GPS to figure out when a vehicle is moving at more than 24/km per hour. That’s when the screen and keypad are locked, making it impossible to email or text while the car is in motion.

lindsey.wiebe@freepress.mb.ca

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