Texting can wait

Some months ago I did something I had never done before: I hurt a human being with my vehicle. She took one step into my path when I was almost at a standstill, so she wasn't grievously injured, but it was my fault for driving up that close behind her. I will never forget the sight of her going down by my front passenger wheel in slow motion. She ended up with a torn ligament in her foot and weeks of pain and inconvenience. I ended up wracked by… regret doesn't begin to cover it. It was the deepest guilt and self-loathing that I had ever experienced. And I wasn't even texting at the time.

Being distracted at the wheel of a car is about the most dangerous thing you can do in your daily life. It doesn't take much speed to cause serious injury to someone. Sometimes, if you don't kill them, the life left to them is worse. If you caused something like that because you were texting, could you forgive yourself?

Almost everyone I know, myself included, texts while driving. Not just when waiting at a traffic light, but while on the move - reversing, parking, doing U-turns, going full throttle on the highway, in congested streets, through intersections with no working traffic lights, and while merging with traffic. It's bad enough with a phone that requires you to press buttons to type letters. It's worse if you have a touch screen. In the one second between lowering your eyes and raising them back to the road, whole universes can be made and unmade.

Werner Herzog - whom Francois Truffaut has called the most important film director alive - has made a 35-minute documentary film about texting and driving that every human being with a driver's licence should watch. From One Second to the Next is financed by the four largest carriers in the United States. AT&T is spearheading the "It Can Wait" campaign, and has stopped actively lobbying against legislation in the US barring the use of telephones in cars. The New York Times calls Mr Herzog's film "the first example of a new genre: the arthouse public service announcement". It obviously works. The film had 1.6 million views on YouTube within a week of its release online. (Ashton Kutcher's speech at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards racked up 2.6 million views in three days, but given the sexiness gap between Ashton Kutcher and a don't-text-while-driving message, Mr Herzog is doing phenomenally well.)

Please watch From One Second to the Next. Make your children, spouses, friends and colleagues watch it. It's a series of interviews with the people involved in crashes caused by drivers who were texting at the time. Two of the four incidents include fatalities - three children of an Amish family in one case, and a scientist in another case. Two incidents cause grievous and permanent damage to the victims: in one case a little boy named Xzavier Davis-Bilbo, who would have been a terrific athlete; and a woman named Debbie Drewniak, who now cannot be let out of her own yard. Of the people who caused a crash, two speak - Chandler Gerber, the man who crashed into the Amish buggy, and Reggie Shaw, who caused the death of a scientist and now devotes his time to raising awareness of the dangers of texting while driving. Mr Herzog's film highlights the devastating ways in which the world can change for both parties because of one second of inattention.

Two studies, in Canada and Australia, have shown that talking on a cell phone quadruples a driver's chances of being involved in a crash. By one estimate, if you're driving at 110 kilometres an hour, and you take your eyes off the road for two seconds, that's 54 metres of road you've missed. In India we drive at about half that speed in the cities, but while that brings our inattention down to a smaller stretch of road, we have many, many more reasons to never be inattentive. Cars, animals, children, adults, cyclists, motorcyclists, bus drivers, camel cart drivers, pedestrians - nobody obeys any traffic laws to speak of. Texting in these circumstances is more or less like playing Russian roulette. Nothing - nothing - is so important that you either cannot wait until you've gotten to where you're going or cannot pull over to read and reply to a message.

All of us feel that sending a text or two while driving is no big deal. Nothing has ever gone wrong before, we think, I'm pretty good at this. I really doubt that I'm going to die because I'm sending a one-word message.

It's one thing to bet your own life on your texting skills. Werner Herzog's film makes you ask the question: am I willing to bet someone else's?