It’s deadly. It’s irresponsible. And we’ve all done it. Before you commute home think about this: Why isn’t there a better solution to texting while driving?

Last week in Los Angeles, celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan drove his car over a cliff while sending a text to Twitter about his his border collie. (Quite possibly this tweet.)

Dr. Ryan’s death is a shame—mitigated only by the fact that he didn’t hurt anyone else. (His dog Jill survived the accident, even.) But it’s impossible not to feel a bit of schadenfreude at his self-inflicted death while doing something so trivial. “Darwin Award!” we chuckle. But we’ve all done it at times—or something equally as distracting while driving.

Texting while driving is especially dangerous, not simply because we’re distracted, but because it necessitates taking one’s eyes off the road, often for many seconds at a time. Anything done while driving is a distraction—looking at an iPod, searching through a purse, even talking on a Bluetooth headset with eyes on the road—simply because it distracts us from the task at hand: piloting a two-ton machine at speeds considered appropriate for only daredevils and experts just a century before. (Tom Vanderbilt’s book ‘Traffic’ addresses this at length, for those interested in statistics.)

But I’ve done it. I suspect many of you have done it. Just last weekend, careening south through rural Missouri in a rented Pontiac, I sent and received a dozen text messages with my sister as we coordinated the logistics of a family emergency. I was upset, tired, and finding being a safe driver difficult enough without trying to peck out letters on a glowing touchscreen with my thumb.

But I did it because that’s what I had to do. I could have pulled over each time. But who does that really?