Texting made the crash risk 23.2 times as high as non-distracted driving for truckers.

One irritant for professional drivers is being treated like some air-headed teenager with a new driver’s license. After all, you’ve been trained to drive a vehicle whose operation is far more complex than anything riding on two axles. As an owner-operator, your years of experience piloting a commercial vehicle likely number in the double digits. Anyone on the road puts their life as risk, but you’ve got one other big stake in the game – your livelihood, should you screw up.

So when safety topics such as cell phone use arise, it’s easy for you to bristle. You know when it’s not safe to talk on the cell, or even to reach for a soft drink. You have enough sense not to consider anything as foolish as punching in a text message while driving.

Yet that one growing practice, perhaps the ultimate bait among the many shiny baubles that can capture a driver’s eyes, hands or mind, has triggered a new focus on driving distractions. As a result, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood plans to hold a summit this month to address the dangers of text-messaging and similar distractions.

One big trigger behind that summons was a recently released Virginia Tech study. You might find its conclusions, which in some ways rank you with those air-headed teens, hard to swallow. For example:

• For truckers, dialing a cell phone made the risk of crash or near-crash 5.9 times as high as non-distracted driving. For four-wheelers, the rate is half (2.8). Simply talking or listening increased the risk slightly for four-wheelers and not at all for truckers.

• For truckers, reaching for an electronic device made the crash risk 6.7 times as high as non-distracted driving. For four-wheelers, the rate is less than a fourth of that (1.4).