How To Avoid Distracted Driving

 

 
What do we see when we’re behind the wheel? What don’t we see? The answers may not be so straight forward. Research shows that what registers in our brains is what we expect to see, not necessarily what we really see. For instance, a person driving a car expects to see others cars on the road. When the driver encounters a bicyclist, the driver may look directly at the cyclist but they may not register with the driver at all. Or perhaps we’ve become desensitized to areas we are most familiar with. Sometimes we don’t see something because it is physically hidden from our view. Other times a blind spot within our own car blocks our view.

Then there are distractions in the car like cd’s, the radio, the glove box, hamburgers, sodas, cell phones, you name it. Outside pedestrians, billboards, animals, and all kinds of activities can distract. Even tinted windows can be a distraction. The list of distractions goes on and on. Let’s consider a driver eating a burger. Eating a hamburger causes a driver to be distracted mentally and physically. Or, take a driver changing the track on a CD player. By the time the driver looks to the CD button, puts his finger on the button, searches forward, and then gets his hand back on the wheel, some three to four seconds may have passed. At sixty miles per hour, your car travels about 90ft. in just on second. In three to four seconds you can cover a lot of ground. Remember, in just four seconds at 60 mph you travel more than the length of a football field.