Driving Distracted

When talking about distracted driving, most people immediately think of cellphones, and how many times we’ve seen people texting or on the phone talking away to someone.

Truth is, distracted driving is anything and everything which takes the driver away from the attention they should be paying to the road.

Let’s go with the big picture here. You’re driving 60 miles per hour (approximately 100 km/h), and you’re taking your eyes off the road for just two seconds, which is long enough to say, reach for your phone, and read maybe a line or two of text. You’ve just travelled about half the length of an american football field. That is a lot of space where things could go wrong.

In most videos I’ve observed, and you can watch so many of them on YouTube, people usually glance at their phone for a longer period of time, some for as long as five seconds, which is about what National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) confirmed through their studies, which can add up to 400 feet travelled (length of an entire football field), but that’s not the only issue, the catch is most people who text behind the wheel, don’t just look away once, they do so over the course of minutes while travelling at highway speeds, especially if the message is longer. All this time, you’re driving on hope and prayer, because essentially, for 400 feet at a time, you’re driving blind, often times, with the truck wondering between the lane, or crossing out of the lane you’re traveling in. Just put the phone down. If you need to get a hold of someone, there are headsets you can buy as cheap as $55, and call the person you wish to talk to, or better yet, wait until you stop. Sending “LOL”, or “What are you doing tonight?” to someone isn’t worth taking a life, or losing your own.

That’s just the phone issue, but there is more!

Driving down the road can become very monotonous, and often, drivers find themselves desensitized to the things on the road. Your eyes start to wonder, and next thing you know, you’re hungry, but you have deadlines, and reaching for that snack is not satisfying enough, so you go for the lunch box, or cooler, and you dig out that container with last night’s leftovers that were so delicious, you can’t wait to dabble into them again. So, you grab that container, and a fork, you balance your container on the steering wheel and either its easy and not slippery, so you can hold the container with one hand on the wheel, and you’re also using it to steer, while the other is holding onto that fork, and it’s headed for that piece of food you’re just barely waiting to drive into you. Suddenly, you’re smashing a three-course meal out of your food container while travelling at 60 mph on a three-lane highway…. Please, just stop at a rest stop, spend the 10 minutes taking that long-deserved break, and move on when you’re ready. Arriving late is better than not arriving at all.

What is the takeaway from this article? We want you to seriously think for a moment and reflect from the mindset of “It can’t happen to me, I’m careful”, to when it happens, it will be too late.
That one text you absolutely had to send, while the SUV which just passed you loaded up with family gets a flat tire, and it suddenly found itself in your travel lane while you weren’t paying attention. You had time to avoid it if you were looking up, just by simply changing a lane, you wouldn’t have hit the SUV, causing harm. You were not injured in this crash, but one of the family members in that SUV isn’t going home tonight. Can you live with that?

That meal you absolutely had to have, while a vehicle in front of you lost a muffler flange, which came bouncing out from underneath that vehicle and struck your left tire, causing a rapid pressure loss, making your vehicle pull to the left, and you went flying into the median. Something you could have possibly recovered from, had your hands been on the wheel, and not busy occupied holding a container and a fork, and now, you’re sitting in your seat in pain from a slipped disc in your back because you got catapulted in your seat while flying into the median, contemplating life, while you have yesterday’s Beef Stroganoff dripping off your face.

There are thousands of these kinds of scenarios we could name here, the truth is, if you’re one of the drivers who allow themselves to be distracted behind the wheel, your story just hasn’t been written yet, but you’re setting the stage for it.