The next time you are on Muni, take a second to look out of your partially graffitied bus window and view the drivers in the cars next to you. There’s a high chance that many of them will be on their phone, texting.

Nearly 330,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving, according to Edgar Snyder and Associates, causing one out of four car accidents in the United States.

As teenagers in our first years of obtaining a license, we must be vigilant while driving. Ninety-four percent of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35 percent admitted to doing it anyway, according to a AAA poll.

It isn’t worth the risk to become seriously injured or lose your life over a text message, no matter how important the message may seem. We need to stop texting while driving or  even sending messages to people whom we know are driving.

No one ever thinks that a tragedy like a car accident will strike him or his family — until it does. As much as we want to think we are a competent enough driver to text while driving, we won’t know that we aren’t until that one text causes us to fly through a stop sign and T-bone a mother with a young child in the car.

It is hard to take precautions for something that has never happened to us. Most of us take a lot of silly risks everyday like jaywalking, but texting and driving does not just put us in harm’s way, it affects other people.

This is not a complex issue. Just put your cellphone away. Save the lives of your fellow drivers, and value your own life enough to not put it at risk.

The choice is not difficult. Don’t text and drive.