Houston Police are investigating a fatal traffic collision Wednesday afternoon in which the driver who died apparently was both speeding and using his cell phone at the time.

Police said a man driving a Ford Taurus on US 290 inbound at Mangum apparently lost control of his vehicle, overcorrected and veered across several traffic lanes, hitting at least two other vehicles in the process.

A pickup truck that his vehicle struck then hit two other vehicles in a chain reaction. The pickup truck’s driver was taken to a hospital in undetermined condition.

Police said the Taurus driver seemed to have been speeding as well as using a cell phone when the collision occurred. They said alcohol did not seem to have been a factor.

Studies show that using a cell phone behind the wheel is as bad as driving while intoxicated. Approximately 5,000 Americans die each year in traffic collisions involving distracted drivers whose attention to the road was diverted by calls or texts while on cell phones.

Texas has no state law banning cell phone use or texting by drivers, unless they are school bus drivers or novice drivers. A state law bans cell phone use while driving in school zones, though school districts are required to post signs to that effect or the law does not apply. Some school districts cannot afford to do that.

However, some Texas municipalities have passed laws making texting by all drivers at all times in all places illegal, including San Antonio and Austin.

Nine states ban all cell phone use by all drivers, and 35 states ban text messaging by all drivers.

Jim S. Adler & Associates urges motorists to hang up and drive. A call or a text cannot be worth a life.

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry has vetoed a new bill the Texas Legislature passed to add Texas to the ranks of 32 other states making it illegal to read or send text messages while driving. Perry says government shouldn’t “micromanage” adults’ behavior, and instead education should be emphasized to steer people from the dangerous habit.

It’s been said by scientists that distracted driving is as bad as drunk driving, and statistics would seem to bear this out. As driving distractions continue to mushroom, so do traffic deaths and injuries due to distracted drivers, who could kill up to 6,000 persons on America’s roads and highways this year. The rate of distracted driving deaths, in fact, has doubled in recent years.

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Longfellow Elementary School students Kaitlynn Sanders, Nautica Winkfield (seated) and Helena Marlowe.

How important is it to stop the deaths and devastation caused by distracted driving? Not enough to compel many state governments — including Texas’ — to do the right thing. And not enough for cell phone companies to set their greed aside and quit fighting safety measures.

But distracted driving dangers have been important enough to spur action by a group of Houston school kids, who seem more wise than many adults. They’re students at Longfellow Elementary School, and what they’ve done is so noteworthy that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has written about it in his personal blog, which has a photo of the students.

In today’s Fast Lane: The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, LaHood commends the Houston kids for taking “public education into their own hands.”

“Budget problems prevented the City of Houston from posting signs near Longfellow alerting drivers to the dangers of texting and cell phone use while driving in a school zone,” LaHood wrote. “So safety-minded students, parents and area residents joined together to create and post their own signs.”

LaHood’s blog also links to “Neighbors Taking Charge,” an item by the Bellaire Examiner noting efforts by the Longfellow PTA and neighboring Woodside Civic Club to make a bad situation better.

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Americans say they just don’t feel safe on the road these days. And it’s distracted driving that frightens them. But, many do it anyway.

That’s the word from a recent national traffic safety study. It was commissioned by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. In one respect, the results aren’t surprising. There is a basis for the fear. Accidents are still one of the leading causes of death in the United States for “children, teens and young adults up to the age of 34.”

So why are drivers doing the very things that scare them when others do them?

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“WHERE U AT.”

That’s a text message — a fatal text message sent by Mariah West, 18, of Missouri, just before she veered off a road, smashed into a bridge and died.

Her story and other sad ones like it are told in The Last Text, a sobering, disturbing and tragic 10-minute documentary produced by AT&T and hosted on its website.

The documentary has interviews with a teen driver who killed a bicyclist while he was texting at the wheel; a teen who was devastatingly injured as a passenger in a texting while driving crash; and friends and relatives of teens who perished in such accidents.

It’s perhaps fitting that the focus is on teens, since they tend to text more than others — sometimes thousands of times per month. Such obsession even has been called an addiction.

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In California, it’s against the law to hold a cell phone while driving. Hands-free devices are allowed, but sacrificing a hand from the wheel — and a large chunk of one’s attention from the road  — is forbidden.

Yet Maria Schwarzenegger was photographed yakking by phone as she drove in California last fall, despite a law her husband helped pass. And on Monday, Disney Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus was stopped by police in North Hollywood as she chatted by phone while driving to a salon for a massage.

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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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