As a follow up to the story I wrote the other day about texting while driving, I decided to conduct a highly unscientific little experiment. I took a stroll around my New Jersey neighborhood and looked in each car as it zoomed past. You'd be surprised to learn how many people weren't paying attention to the road.It was exactly 50%. Fully half the drivers I saw were doing something other than paying attention to the road in front of them.

During the course of my walk, 82 cars passed me. Of the 82, 41 of the drivers were staring straight down the road, doing what they're supposed to be doing. The other 41, however, were distracted by any number of things. Several were eating. Several were looking for something in their car. One guy was messing with his GPS unit on the dashboard. But the bulk of the distracted people were paying attention to cell phones.

Of the 82 drivers, 33 (that's 40%) were talking on their cell phones or looking at their cell phones. Whether they were sending SMS messages or scrolling through their contacts list or looking at the in-box is impossible to say. Whatever they were doing, their full faculties weren't being focused on guiding their vehicles safely down the street. The use of cellular phones while driving is illegal in New Jersey, and has been for a while.

Obviously, I had no control over the sample of drivers, and only took notes for a period of 45 minutes. Had I taken a larger sampling over a longer period of time, my results could have been drastically different. Still. In the brief time I was paying attention to what other drivers were doing, 50% of them weren't. Scary.