With Tuesday’s state Senate passage of a bill making it illegal to text while driving, it looks like Pennsylvania will soon join 41 other states in trying to curtail this dangerous and deadly activity.

The Senate action follows Monday passage by the House of a ban on texting while driving. The House version removed a ban on all hand-held use of mobile phones while driving that was part of an earlier bill passed by the Senate. Gov. Tom Corbett is expected to sign the ban, allowing it to become law in 120 days.

Banning texting while driving is appropriate, given that 5,500 people died in automobile accidents involving distracted driving in 2009. Texting represents a majority of those accidents. In addition, about 500,000 people a year are injured in distracted driving accidents. While there are many distractions for those behind the wheel today, texting is a major — and growing — issue.

If the dangers of texting while driving once seemed abstract to drivers in Butler County, they don’t now. The Tuesday night one-car accident that killed a Knoch High School senior is a sobering reminder of the dangers of texting while driving. State police say the popular and active 17-year-old died after the distraction of texting behind the wheel caused her car to drop off the berm of the road. Police say it appears she then overcorrected, lost control of her car and smashed into a tree with the brunt of the impact hitting the driver’s side door.

Despite the hope offered by the coming ban on texting while driving, there are some questions and concerns about how best to make the roads safer.

One question is enforcement. How aggressively will police enforce the law? How difficult will it be to spot texting drivers?

Given the fact that a number of states, including New York and California, ban all hand-held cell phone use, it’s also possible that Harrisburg lawmakers will reintroduce the broader ban on hand-held cell phone use. It’s an idea worth considering, since technology now allows voice dialing and full hands-free operation.

Pennsylvania’s prohibition will make texting a primary offense, and that lets police pull over a driver for texting without first finding some other violation first. That should help.

While enforcement and a $50 ticket for texting while driving should discourage the dangerous practice, more should be done to educate drivers, especially young drivers, about the dangers of distracted driving.

More important than enforcement is education. And the best way to convince people of the dangers of texting while driving is to show them.

That critical objective — education — is a good reason to return drivers ed to high school curriculums. Several decades ago, high schools taught drivers education. Today, it’s left up to parents and their teenage drivers. That’s not good enough.

Drivers education should be a required course and an updated program would include obstacle-course style training in a controlled environment such as a large, empty parking lot to show teenagers how quickly texting can get them into trouble. Updated drivers education would feature distracted driving demonstrations as well as panic stops, obstacle avoidance, how to safely control a car after a tire drops of the berm of a road, skid reaction, hydroplaning and more.

Simply requiring teenagers to have 60 hours of supervised driving experience, as Harrisburg lawmakers recently did, and to pass the PennDOT road test is not enough. It’s too basic and does not involve real-world experiences.

Granted, school budgets are under pressure and some classes or activities have been trimmed to save money. But reinventing drivers education after returning it to the high school curriculum could save lives and should be a priority.

After banning texting while driving, Harrisburg lawmakers should mandate a return of in-school drivers education, including updated training experiences to reflect the deadly hazards facing drivers today.