Simulator exposes Montgomery High students to dangers of texting while driving

Just seconds after receiving a text message, teen driver Alex Reinhorn sideswiped a parked car, possibly totaling both vehicles and injuring herself and others.

Luckily, the scenario played out safely indoors at Montgomery High School instead of on the streets of Santa Rosa. Reinhorn was practicing on a driving simulator, which the telecom giant AT&T has been touring at local high schools to bring home the message that it’s unsafe to text and drive.

“I thought I was doing good and I could just read it,” Reinhorn said moments after her digital world accident. “And then I crashed.”

The simulator program is part of the “It Can Wait” campaign that puts young motorists behind the wheel in a video game, driving through city streets while trying to answer and reply to texts on a handheld phone.

The experience can expose young drivers to the carnage they can cause without the real world consequences. Just about every student who tried their hand at the vehicular multi-tasking Tuesday failed, some catastrophically.

“Our goal with this campaign is to save lives,” said C.J. Johnson, the It Can Wait campaign leader for AT&T.

The simulator will be at Montgomery again on Wednesday morning and later in the day at Maria Carrillo High School. Cardinal Newman students tried it out last week.

The lesson isn’t just for high school students.

“Even though we target teenagers, it also applies to teachers, parents, anyone,” Johnson said.

Arturo Morales, a senior who was in the driver’s seat Tuesday, received a text, looked down and allowed the speed of his “car” to go from 30 mph to 37 mph while he was reading the screen. Seeing a stop light head, he slowed, but stopped several car lengths before the intersection.

Weaving between two lanes, Morales sped up again to 38 mph, then got another text and coasted to 28 mph before he mistakenly stopped at a green light as he read the text.

Moments later, an oncoming car performed a U-turn and struck Morales’ car.

“What’s that guy doing?” said an astonished Morales, after crashing. “I had the right of way.”

That’s true, Johnson told him. “But if you hadn’t been distracted, you could have avoided it,” he said, which Morales acknowledged.

“It was a good experience,” Morales said. “It just takes that one second looking down and looking back up. If I was paying attention, it wouldn’t have happened.”

A state law in effect since 2009 made it illegal to read, write or send a text message while driving. First-time violators are cited $20 for a first offense and $50 for each subsequent offense, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the past five years, however, Sonoma County has seen several fatal crashes involving cellphone use. Last year, a 30-year-old Rohnert Park man pleaded no contest to felony vehicular manslaughter in a distracted driving crash that killed two Santa Rosa women on Highway 12. In 2010, 19-year-old Sonoma State University student who was texting while driving struck and killed a 2-year-old girl in a Rohnert Park crosswalk and seriously injured her mother.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that there are at least 3,000 deaths annually from crashes in which drivers lost focus on the control of their vehicles due to manual, visual or cognitive distraction, including cellphone use. Texting simultaneously involves manual, visual and mental distraction and is among the worst of all driver distractions, the agency reported.

Young and inexperienced drivers are at the most risk, the highway safety agency concluded, as drivers under age 25 are two to three times more likely than older drivers to send text messages or emails while driving - and are less likely than older passengers to speak up if the driver is texting.

The consequences, as the Montgomery students experienced Tuesday, can be deadly. They watched a short documentary produced by AT&T called “The Last Text” that highlights several tragedies caused by texting while driving.

Sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds. At 55 mph, that is the equivalent of driving the length of an entire football field, blind, according to the federal highway safety agency.

The It Can Wait program aims to make texting and driving “as socially unacceptable as drunk driving,” Johnson said.

Montgomery Principal Laurie Fong said she “begged” AT&T to bring the simulator to her school.

“With (the anti-drunken driving program) “Every 15 Minutes,” kids get that,” she said. “But they all text. It’s like an extension of their arm. And it just takes a second for something tragic to happen.”

You can reach Lori A. Carter at 521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @loriacarter.