Stop Teens From Texting While Driving With These Five Top Apps
A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center called Teens and Distracted Driving finds that about 25% of teenaged drivers text while at the wheel. Half of all teens have been in a car driven by a texting teen, too. This kind of careless driving behavior is equally prevalent both among boys and girls.
As car insurance experts at kanetix.ca and elsewhere mention in articles on teen driver insurance, insurance companies charge high premiums of teen drivers for good reason – at their young age, teens are usually unable to judge how risky certain kinds of behavior are. It can be very hard for adults, leave alone teenagers, to understand the seriousness of distracted driving.
Perhaps the problem that cellphones have created, cellphones solve, too
Both the iOS and Android platforms have many apps intended to help teenagers learn to contain the temptation to text while they drive.
Some of these apps have simple texting locks. Others hand control to the parents of teens. Here’s a list of the top 5 apps that can help your child keep from texting while driving.
TextBuster
TextBuster is a complete hardware-software system. It requires a hardware device to be installed on the car that the teen drives. Every time the teen enters the car, the hardware device senses his presence and sends a signal to the phone to disable texting. It still leaves phone calls enabled, though. The entire system costs about $200.
Canary
This app goes on both the parent’s phone and the child’s phone. Any time the app on the child’s phone detects through the phone’s inbuilt GPS that there is movement faster than 12 mph, it watches for any texting activity. If the teen texts while driving, the parent gets an alert.
Canary also allows parents to set on the app what areas of the city the teen is allowed to go to. If the app finds the teen entering forbidden territory, it sends out an alert. The app can’t be turned off without consequences, either. When it’s turned off, the parent gets an alert.
DriveOFF
It isn’t just text messages that are a distraction. Phone calls, email, multimedia messages and even screensavers can tempt a teen to look away from the road. Like other safe driving apps, this one uses the phone’s inbuilt GPS to detect when the teen may be driving. It then shuts off automatically shuts off all distractions.
Drive Scribe
Drive Scribe offers some powerful features. The downside, though, is that the app needs to be turned on manually. Each time your teen turns the app on, it automatically detects when the teen is driving and shuts down all calls and text messages. It also constantly monitors the car’s speed and sends out warnings if any stop signs are jumped or speed limits violated.
DriveMode
This app is by phone carrier AT&T. It has an ingenious take on preventing texting while driving. Each time it detects that the owner of the phone is moving fast enough to be in car, it launches itself and responds to every phone call and text message with a message that says that the owner of the phone is driving. It also disables all signs of calls or messages incoming.
Robert Conway is an avid blogger and father of five young drivers. He likes to share his experiences by posting on various blog sites.
