Test Your Driving-While-Texting Reflexes
Be honest: Have you ever texted while driving? Ever snuck a peek at your e-mail while approaching a traffic light? Well, to be blunt, that's insane. And now you can prove it to yourself: Play the New York Times "Gauging Your Distraction" game.
You play with your PC's keyboard -- while driving down a stretch of highway, press numbers as they appear to change lanes to pass through toll booths. At the same time, you have to read and respond to messages that appear in an on-screen cell phone.
When you're done, you'll get a score that shows how you did with and without cell phone distractions. I took the test and found that I was almost a half second slower to react to events while texting, and I missed 20 percent -- that's a full one in five -- of all the toll booths. Pretty convincing stuff.
And yeah, you might notice that we're a little preoccupied with the dangers of using a cell phone on the road these days: