(Kentucky Office of Highway Safety)–April is Distracted Driving Awareness month.

While anything that takes a driver’s eyes off the road, hands off the wheel or mind off the task of driving is a hazard, the risk of texting while driving causes heightened concern because it combines all three types of distraction – visual, manual and cognitive.

Violating Kentucky’s texting law, which took effect April 15, 2010, can be costly. Violators are liable for fines of $25 on a first offense and $50 on each subsequent offense, plus court costs.

The law bans texting for drivers of all ages while the vehicle is in motion. For drivers over 18, the law allows the use of global positioning devices and reading and selecting or entering a telephone number or name for the purpose of making a phone call. Texting is allowed only to report illegal activity or to request medical or emergency aid.

For drivers under 18, no use of personal communication devices, such as cell phones and pagers, is allowed while the vehicle is in motion. The use of a global positioning system is allowed, but manually entering information must be completed while the vehicle is stopped.

In Kentucky, there were more than 57,000 crashes last year, resulting in 14,600 injuries and 147 fatalities due to distracted driving.

According to a 2014 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the risk of a crash or near-crash among novice drivers increased with the performance of many secondary tasks, including texting and dialing cell phones.

An analysis by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety of 2009-2012 data found that while more than 80 percent of drivers believed it was completely unacceptable for a motorist to text behind the wheel, more than a third of those same drivers admitted to reading text messages while operating a passenger motor vehicle themselves.