Texting While Driving

6/24/09
Texting while driving seems as dangerous as driving moderately drunk. Very scary. As the parent of soon-to-be teen drivers, that got me thinking about counter-measures. In some ideal world, the texting feature on the phone would be disabled while the key is in the ignition. That's not happening any time soon. So here is the best thing I can think of...I would like software to automatically correlate time-of-day texts are sent with the speed of the car at that time. If a text was sent at 14:42:07, and the car was going 32 mph at that time, and my child was driving at that time, then that is a problem.

This is a very reactive solution, but better than nothing.

8/30/09 Update
When I wrote the above, I was overlooking the fact that most phones have GPS built in. That would make it pretty simple, I think, to build this functionality all into the phone ( I was thinking it would require in-car software). So, searching around a little bit--here we go. For Android, we have Textecution. $9.95 though--rather pricey, and seemingly no trial or Lite option. What a great idea though. This company, and maybe the mobile carriers, need to find a way to partner with anti-texting-while-driving-advocates to get a regulatory push for this stuff.

(Google Market search note--no apps found when using the obvious search of "texting", "driving".)