The Global Battle Against Texting While Driving

Great Britain is treating text messaging while driving as an offense tantamount to drunk driving, and establishing itself as the toughest anti-texting and driving nation in the world.

The campaign against text messaging while driving has been steadily gaining ammo in recent months: Text-related crashes are reported at a high frequency, and The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute revealed the results of a study in July that showed text messaging to multiply the risk of collision by 23. But text-related accidents continue to occur, and only a minority of American states and countries across the world have outlawed texting while driving.

It may take a country like Great Britain using certain texting-while-driving cases as an example to drive the message home -- across the pond, sending off a single text and averting your eyes from the road for a moment can land you in prison. Take, for example, a young British woman who crashed her car into another woman's vehicle last year and killed her. Today, the driver is serving a 21-month jail sentence, a punishment many have criticized for being too lenient.

Britain's newest guidelines are such that a cellular phone's involvement in a fatal crash will "always make the offense more serious," and texting is considered particularly grave because of its riskiness. The rules apply to both reading and composing messages while driving, both of which are categorized in the same way that drunk or high driving is.

In order to reach its young population and emphasize the seriousness of doing something that seems relatively benign in comparison to most criminal behaviors, Britain has released a 30-minute video that shows a series of very graphic and violent vehicle crashes for showing in British high schools. It's a dramatic and gruesome video, but it's been received effectively.

"Texting is in its own universe of risk,” said Rich Hanowski, on overseer of the study conducted this summer by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.