R Teens Txt Msg Addicts?

July 17, 2007 — -- At about 10:05 p.m., a text message was sent from Bailey Goodman's cell phone, according to Sheriff Philip C. Povero of Ontario County, N.Y. Thirty-seven seconds later, the phone received a text reply, asking: What R U doing?

Goodman had been driving four of her friends to her family's vacation home to celebrate their high school graduation five days earlier. Thirty-eight seconds after her phone received that message, another phone rang -- this one at a police station -- with an eyewitness's report that Goodman's car had just collided into a tractor-trailer in western New York.

Was Goodman, an inexperienced 17-year-old driver typing into her phone's keypad, one hand off the wheel and eyes averted from the road? Is this why she didn't see the truck and couldn't avoid the collision that took her life and those of her four teenage passengers?

"Cell phone records indicate the phone was in use," Povero told ABC News. "The text messaging may have been a contributing factor, but we do not know or will we ever be able to determine who was text messaging in the automobile."

The addictiveness of cell phones, and the dangers of calling while driving, has become a high-profile issue over the past several years. But the effects of text messaging -- which is likely even more dangerous because drivers must avert their eyes from the road for longer periods -- have been mostly ignored.

Is addiction to text messaging interfering with the lives of teens and endangering their safety? The evidence is mounting: Twenty-eight percent of teens admit to sending text messages while driving, according to a study just released by the American Automobile Association and Seventeen magazine.

Signs of a youth population increasingly hooked on text messaging abound. Sixty-five percent of people between the ages of 18 and 28 send text messages, nearly double the population average of 35 percent, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. In total, a whopping 93.8 billion text messages were sent in the United States during the last six months of 2006, nearly double the 48.6 billion sent in the same period in 2005, according to CTIA, an industry trade group for wireless communications.