In 2009, fewer Americans died in traffic accidents than in any year since 1950, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Vehicle crashes killed 33,808 Americans last year, the lowest total since records began being kept in 1950, when 33,186 perished. That’s also 10 per cent fewer traffic fatalities than in 2008.

But before we celebrate, consider the families of those 33,808 victims. Their loved ones remain a statistic — and a grim one — and they cannot celebrate. And if they can’t, why can we?

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Emmy-nominated actress Jane Lynch, who plays fiery cheerleader coach Sue Sylvester on hit Fox TV show Glee, has joined LG Text Ed, a new campaign to coach parents how to teach teens to use mobile phones responsibly and avoid distracted driving.

Lynch will appear in webisodes for the campaign on driving while distracted, and she also will be a member of its council. The effort is sponsored by LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company, a division of South Korea’s LG Electronics.

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Beverly Hills, CA plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan loved to send and receive messages via texts. But apparently he didn’t get one message until too late: Texting while driving kills.

Body reshaper of reality TV’s Heidi Montag, rock music’s Gene Simmons and Vince Neil and modeling’s Janice Dickinson, Ryan, 50, died Monday. It seems the Jeep he was driving veered off the Pacific Coast Highway and crashed upside-down at the bottom of a 200-foot embankment.

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America’s teens seem to have a disconnect between what they’ve been told and what they do. They’ve been told and given fair warning that distracted driving is deadly, killing 6,000 Americans yearly and injuring hundreds of thousands. Yet 86 per cent of teen drivers indulge in distracted driving anyway, often in the form of texting or making cell phone calls while at the wheel.

This finding came via a study conducted by Seventeen magazine and AAA auto club and reported by USA Today. It reported other common forms of distracted driving among teens as eating, adjusting a music device, applying makeup and driving with four or more other teens in the vehicle.

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Texas has 17 million drivers on its roads. Sadly, several million of them who once passed a driving test wouldn’t be able to pass one today.

At least, that’s the finding of a recent GMAC Insurance study, which showed that almost 20 per cent of drivers nationwide — or about 38 million — would fail a driving test. In Texas that translates to about 3.4 million drivers who’d fail a driving test.

The survey also showed that Texas ranks 35th among the 50 states in driving test abilities. GMAC said Texans got 76 per cent of its driving test questions correctly, a bit below the national average of 76.2 per cent.

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The long Memorial Day weekend ahead is sure to bring car accident misery to Texas roads. But it’s also sure to bring more enforcement of our roadway laws. That’s because Texas Department of Public Safety officers will be out in force. While you play, they will work.

Last year, DPS officers issued more than 8,500 speeding tickets on Memorial Day weekend. They also wrote out 1,937 tickets for failing to wear seat belts and 521 for failing to provide proper child restraints. They also arrested 622 people for drunk driving.

Those kinds of violations again will be targeted for this long weekend, the DPS promises.

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“How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s humanistic sentiments when he wrote 1962′s Blowin’ in the Wind could be reworded to fit Americans’ driving-while-texting tragedies today. How many such distracted driving deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died, and embrace our responsibility behind the wheel? And how many deaths will it take till Texas bans texting while driving — as 23 states already have?

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Kentucky and Nebraska recently became the 22nd and 23rd states to ban texting while driving, and such laws are pending in most other states. But they don’t include Texas. So soon Texas will be in a minority, with no driving safety law making it illegal to send and read text messages at the wheel of a vehicle.

Such laws are vital because too many Americans aren’t using common sense while operating a motor vehicle. Their distracted driving car crash accidents are slaughtering Americans, with 6,000 traffic fatalities yearly and more than half a million injuries, many of them serious.

Were those texts or calls worth such a price?

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The Houston Chronicle‘s new study of Houston area traffic accidents ended with this assessment by the Texas Transportation Institute: As drivers in the state’s largest city, with 83 million miles traveled daily, our “margin of error is extremely small.”

You could be doing everything right — wearing your seat belt, signaling when you change lines, obeying the speed limit, setting aside your cell phone — and still have a fatal car accident. That’s because it only takes a moment’s inattention or a single mistake –by you or another driver — to cause a car wreck or traffic tragedy.

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Driving deaths overall are down in America, but could be much lower without one thing: distracted drivers who call or text at the wheel. A new report by the U.S. Department of Transportation reveals the United States had 33,963 traffic fatalities in 2009, a drop of 8.9 per cent from 2008. With driving deaths declining for 15 consecutive quarters, this also was the lowest level since 1954.

But imagine how much better it could be without the onslaught of cell phone addiction. Millions of Americans drive with one hand on the wheel — at best — while calling and texting with the other. And when only a moment’s inattention can cause a lifetime of misery, these driving distractions are among the biggest threats on our roads today.

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