I just hope she learned her lesson and she can push her friends to be more responsible as well. Can't learn if mistakes aren't made. And one way to learn is through people close to you that have been hurt. So maybe this small tragedy can somehow convince the next person to not kill someone that they might have if this had not happened. If no one died then it should be just that. A lesson. We can all learn from this even if we don't text and drive.

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The shame of it all is that it does take something like this to happen to people personally, or to a loved one/someone close to them for it to hit home.
All day long on the roads I look in my mirror or at the person next to me and they have their fuqqing phone in their hands and/or their head is tilted down looking at the screen, not the road in front of them.
People just don't get it and that makes me sad and angry.

+1

This happens with almost every sort of risk assessment people do. We get scared about things like flying on an airplane or a tornado gouging our house; things that rarely happen. But we have utterly backwards assessments of things that happen at a high frequency, like driving mistakes of any sort. It's sad.

I personally only text when I'm at a full stop at a fresh green light, and only after clearing the area of things I should care about (flashing lights, peds...). I never talk on the phone while I drive. Too often when I have done that, it scares me that I don't actually recall the last x blocks of driving. We *think* we can multitask...until that one time we fuq it up and realization charges a huge cost for the lesson. It pisses me off as well that I can literally count on 25% of drivers to be on their phone while they drive. And I get sad when I see they have full child seats in the back as they talk it while speeding up to squeeze into the intersection on a stale yellow with no signal of their own since their hands are busy.

(I deal with this in security as well. Few people take security seriously, whether it's a business dealing with information security or a homeowner who keeps putting off the home alarm system. It suddenly becomes essential *after* an incident or after someone very near to them suffers it. We have terrible risk assessing skills, and poor ability to envision 2 steps ahead. We need better thinking skills in people and to pass on the bad lessons. The only driver's ed class I remember was the sim where the sim cheated and put us into a situation that would have resulted in an accident had it been running at full speed. Businesses get penetation tests for reasons beyond just testing, but to roleplay the reality of an incident...)

(And most of my life's pet peeves are centered around people's driving habits. I drive like I wish everyone drove.)