Driving Distractions
How often have you driven home from work or gone on a journey to see friends and family only to be stuck on the motorway at a standstill. When the traffic finally gets moving again, nine times out of ten you will eventually pass a vehicle or two being lifted onto a tow truck with the remnants of an accident still strewn across the lanes of the motorway.
I don’t know about you but when this occurs on a bright day with clear visibility I often wonder how the accident could have occurred in the first place.
For many years drink driving was regarded as the top danger for putting our road users at risk, causing accidents with the potential to inflict horrific injuries and worse, leading to the loss of life. Present day has seen distracted driving fast becoming the number one cause of accidents on our roads. What with mobile phones, iPods and Satellite Navigation Systems being readily available with many new cars having the options to use them built in, whilst they a convenience we don’t want to live without, they have the potential, thanks to the distractions they cause, to cause serious and often deadly car accidents thanks to the distractions they cause.
Studies were carried out as far back as 2003 in America, which showed that those drivers, who engaged in a long telephone conversation whilst driving, were actually worse whilst behind the wheel of their car than those who were driving above the legal limit of alcohol consumption. Whilst we allow drivers to have cordless or Bluetooth telephones in their car, some studies have shown that there is no significant difference when comparing stopping distances between people using these types of phones and those that use a handheld.
Although the use of handheld telephones is prohibited whilst driving, many people choose to ignore this and their use is still causing many accidents. Scarier than this is the fact that text messaging is probably causing even more accidents than telephone use. A study in America in 2009 showed that a huge 81% of their accidents were caused by distracted driving with text messaging being the single largest distraction.
Text messaging makes us over 73 times more likely to be involved in an accident, than if we were driving undistracted.
There are many other distractions other than just mobile phones. How our passengers behave, how we interact with them, how loud we have our music, ill health and much more can provide a distraction. The result however is the same. A driver who is not capable of giving their full attention to their driving is more likely to be involved in an accident.
Driving skills are taught right from the moment we first get behind the wheel of a car with our driving instructor, and a reputable company will ensure that all new drivers are aware of all the dangers they may be exposed to whilst driving including those they can cause themselves. Everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car owes it to themselves and other users of the road to be a responsible driver.
