Shockingly, distracted drivers get into more crashes.

Pulled over in Virginia for texting while driving? Just say you were looking at a map or trying to place a phone call!

Texting while driving is a dumb practice, but a pair of Virginia lawmakers are not satisfied with how that stupidity is currently punished.

Even though they know better, as many as 43 percent of teen drivers surveyed admit they send and read text messages while operating their vehicles, according to a new report commissioned by AT&T.

Writing a text message while behind the wheel in Maryland is illegal. But reading texts isn’t — at least, not yet. The Old Line State’s legislature is attempting to rectify that by introducing legislation that would ban drivers from reading texts and emails as they drive in the state. (Apparently, a similar “measure went before lawmakers last year, but differences between the House and Senate were not worked out, and the bill failed to pass.”)…

After a decline in the amount of citations for cell phone-related distracted driving in the District in 2009, police are back on track to smash the ticketing record this year. WTOP reports that D.C. police have issued 11,088 of the $100 citations so far this year — that’s almost as many as they did in all of 2008, when a record 11,904 citations were handed out. According to projections, the total number of talking and…

When TV mega star Oprah Winfrey isn’t dishing with Rielle Hunter on the private lives of former presidential candidates, she has something else on her mind: text messaging. Specifically, she’s waging her own one-woman (albeit with a pretty power megaphone) campaign to stop drivers from texting and using cell phones while driving. And she wants more people to sign up for her “No Phone Zone” pledge. The national event Friday found a local angle…

First out of the gate to grandstand over the recent news that a Metro operator was suspended without pay for five days after being caught on video sending a text message while driving a Blue Line train: Kwame Brown (D-At large)! “I am shocked that an operator would be callous enough to risk the safety of passengers by texting on a cell phone,” Brown said in a statement today. “Metro didn’t go far enough in…

WJLA/ABC7 reports that an unidentified Metrorail operator was suspended for five days without pay after a Metro rider posted a YouTube video of the driver that appears to show him using a cell phone to send an SMS while operating a Blue Line train. You can’t specifically tell what the operator is doing in the grainy cell phone video — he’s just seen looking down at something in his hands — but it was…