U are right. It is the user - but it is always the case the slow person in the left lane is gabbing, not driving. I love my tech. I love cell phones - but mainly for the data - and it is equally as many men as women. Today just happened to be a young girl but old men are just as bad. This problem knows no boundaries.
I'm afraid you are correct. It's going to take a bunch more of horrific crashes and fatalities before enough people wise up to make driving while talking / texting / whatever (watching a movie?!) just totally socially unacceptable, never mind illegal.
It's already illegal in many states, as others have noted. However, enforcement is spotty (understandably), and so many people seem to have that off-the-wall inner assurance that their occasional (?!) use of a smartphone while driving is no big deal. All it takes is one exception and they're dead with no chance to learn that they were wrong (and maybe took someone else's life as well as their own).
Law enforcement budgets are strained but there need to be some concerted spot checks and accompanying media publicity to avoid racking up horrible stats from the deadly combination of jacked-up speed limits, texting while driving and so far getting away with it.
Some more public service ads in prime time and on the net would be a good idea. Relatives of dead texters-while-driving. Friends don't let friends text while driving and etc etc. It's maybe worse than substance-impaired driving, only because it's probably more prevalent now than stoned driving... although who really knows, with some states having legalized medical marijuana and the whole country dealing with opiate addiction as a spinoff of the long overdue crackdown on semi-recreational painkiller prescriptions.
One way or another, it's risky to bet that the oncoming driver or the one about to cut you off is completely focused on the task of controlling his or her moving weapon of choice. Yet what can we do, we have to get to the job or the store or the ballfield to pick up the kids. I swear now I think about places I could veer towards if I see someone drifting acorss the line at me... this stretch of road I'd go off to the right, that stretch I'd have to cross the line myself if I had time and a clear lane... plus around here none of the roads were really engineered for speeds of even 55, and people are hitting 70 on them. Sometimes I see them texting on the town roads I take as shortcuts to various villages around here. That's really nuts since half those roads are barely paved and have terrible potholes. Yet these kids are driving their big ol' pickups and texting. And leaving not much room for oncoming. I only take the roads because otherwise the trips are twice as long. Maybe I should think about twice as long meaning longer to live, though!
I used to love getting into the car and just driving down to NYC from the mountains now and then. Just on a whim on a nice day. See a few people from the back-then days, hang out in the coffee shop for awhile or hit a museum, grab some great takeout from some ethnic food place that actually knows how to cook what they're selling, slap that into the cooler and head back upstate. Not any more. I do it once in awhile but I always feel like I should put my affairs in order first, just in case I meet a texter right before meeting my Maker. At 80 miles an hour because that's the minimum speed now as one approaches the city, even if the limit is 65. It's sad, really. Rushing to meet death on the highway?! I may give up those trips pretty soon. I'd rather die falling over the damn cat coming downstairs in the morning, or trying to uproot the last of that obnoxious bishopweed from out the back of my garden.
