Brian Singer/twitspotting.com Hey, if you have a horrible habit of texting while driving, it's quite possible you're about to be put on blast. If you are driving in San Francisco, at least.
Brian Singer (not to be confused with director Bryan Singer, who is bringing us X-Men: Days of Future Past soon), has started an online campaign where he takes photos of people texting while driving and posts them on his site, TWIT (texting while in traffic) Spotting. He also asks people to submit photos of their own, taken from the passenger seat, natch.
TWIT Spotting started when Brian realized there was a huge number of people on his daily commute staring at a tiny screen instead of staring at the road while they operate a two-ton killing machine. Also known as cars.
"I've been blown away by the number of people texting while in traffic, on the freeway," he told the site Gizmodo. "For every nose picker, there's 20 texters. Unofficial estimation by me."
Recently, Singer has taken it to a whole new shaming level by renting out billboards around the Bay area to display the photos of texting drivers.
"My hope is that it will freak some people out and make them think twice before picking up the phone while driving," Singer said "My greater hope is that it inspires others to start taking photos, too. If enough people started doing this, it could have a dramatic effect on people's behavior."
There are 11 billboards thus far of TWITing drivers, and appropriately enough, April is Distracted Driver Awareness Month.
Of course, everyone is guilty of at least glancing at their phone while at a red light or stopped in traffic, but it's behavior that needs to stop. It leads to too many deaths and traffic accidents, especially among teenagers. So, we applaud Brian's campaign. For more info on his project, you can read about it on his website.
Don't text and drive, people! Nothing is worth a potentially fatal accident. Not even reading an email that reads "Jake Gyllenhaal goes full frontal for new movie!"