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A tiny Welsh college and its local police constabulary succeeded spectacularly this summer in alerting young people around the world to the risks of texting while driving with a distressing YouTube video (search “driving and texting PSA”) that graphically dramatizes the carnage caused by a cellphone-addicted teen.

The video, which went viral on the Internet, builds on a growing body of empirical evidence that confirms what any fretting parent would say, which is that texting behind the wheel is another form of Russian roulette.

A July study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that truckers who were texting on the road were almost 24 times as likely to have an accident or a near miss, compared to non-distracted drivers. “VTTI's research,” the authors noted, “showed that text messaging, which had the highest risk of over 20 times worse than driving while not using a phone, also had the longest duration of eyes off road time (4.6 s over a 6-s interval). This equates to a driver travelling the length of a football field at 55 mph [110 km/h] without looking at the roadway.”

The perils are clear, and Canada's wireless sector needs to be part of the solution.

The study warned that “this cellphone task has the potential to create a true crash epidemic if texting-type tasks continue to grow in popularity and the generation of frequent text message senders reach driving age in large numbers.”

Other voices have joined this discussion: Over the summer, The New York Times ran an investigative series on the perils of driving and texting. The states of New York and Utah recently passed anti-texting laws, with Utah's allowing for long prison terms that put the activity in the same league as driving under the influence.

The Ontario government's much more tentative “distracted driver” legislation, approved in April, comes into effect on Oct. 26. The penalties will include fines up to $500 for using hand-held devices with a screen.

But in the country that invented the BlackBerry, such attention raises a question about corporate responsibility: What is Canada's wireless sector – and leading firms, including Research in Motion, Rogers and Bell – doing to educate its customers about the risks?

Answer: as little as possible.

By comparison to the liquor industry's highly visible public education campaigns about the hazards of drunk driving (TV, radio, billboards, print, Internet), the smart-phone sector is disturbingly uncommunicative about the skeletons in its closet.

According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association's website, www.txt.ca, the annual volume of texting in Canada has grown by more than fourfold since 2005, and could soon overtake verbal communication as the primary driver of traffic over wireless networks.

Yet RIM's website makes no mention whatsoever of the issue of dangerous texting. Rogers's safe-driving page recommends a hands-free telephone and a few other tips, but includes nothing about texting, despite the firm's high-profile foray into smart phones. Likewise, Bell's 2008 corporate responsibility report – which mentions community-minded programs such as the company's support for the Kids Help 1-800 service – is silent on initiatives to curb driving and texting.

As for the industry association? Several years ago, the CWTA launched a website called “Focus on Driving,” which includes an online quiz, some animated graphics and a PSA produced well before the texting craze gained momentum. The site hasn't been updated since 2006, and the online campaign didn't extend to other media. RIM is absent from the list of corporate partners.

“Texting and driving just makes no sense whatsoever,” CWTA spokesman Marc Choma said. But he acknowledged that the association is planning no new public education campaigns on the newest source of distraction. “This is a much bigger issue than just texting,” Mr. Choma added.

In that sense, he's right: There are plenty of other culprits, including dashboard screens – now increasingly common in digitally equipped cars and specifically exempted from the provisions of Ontario's distracted driver legislation – as well as those portable global positioning systems that can be attached to the inside of a vehicle windshield.

The Ontario government also exempted GPS units from its law. But this class of gadget now includes some of the newest smart phones, which come with GPS functionality and can be used in a moving vehicle as a way-finding tool.

The moral of 15 years of drunk-driving media awareness campaigns is that the virtuous combination of tough legal sanctions, pressure from advocacy groups and corporate responsibility can successfully alter public behaviour and attitudes. Once indifferent, the beer and liquor industry became part of the solution.

How many texting tragedies have to occur before the smart-phone industry gets that message?

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and author.