Don't Text While Driving: The Effect of Smartphone Text Messaging on Road Safety during Simulated Driving

Text messaging on smartphones uses a full soft keyboard instead of the numeric buttons on traditional mobile phones. While being more intuitive, the lack of tactile feedback from physical buttons increases the need for user focus, which may compromise safety in certain settings. This paper reports from an empirical study of the effect of text messaging on road safety. We compared the use of a traditional mobile phone and a smartphone for writing text messages during simulated driving. The results confirm that driver performance when texting decreases considerably as there are significant increases in reaction time, car-following distance, lane violation, number of crash/near-crash incidents, perceived task load and the amount of time the driver is looking away from the road. The results also show that smartphones makes this even worse; on key performance parameters they increase the threat from text messaging while driving. These results suggest that drivers should never text while driving, especially not with a smartphone.