There may come a day, possibly even within the next ten years, when you’ll be able to hop in a car, start it up, then kick back, relax, watch movies, read a book, play games or just chat through voice or social media with all your friends and just not have to worry about what’s happening on the road. That’s the future that self-driving cars are working towards, but that future isn’t here yet.
Right now, we still need people to drive cars, and they need to pay attention to the road. That’s because the big difference sitting at a café and getting into a Twitter argument with your friends and doing it while driving a car is that the car punishes negligence with creating some kind of street pizza, which can be either the people in the car itself or whatever the car hits once people stop paying attention to the road.
There’s a name for this kind of mishap and it’s called distracted driving.
Three Types of Distraction
Simply put, distracted driving pertains to the act of driving while at the same time the driver is engaged in other activities. This action compromises the safety of the driver and the passengers, as well as anyone in the vicinity, such as pedestrians, other drivers, and passengers in other vehicles.
Now, what is considered as distractions? There are three types that you must be familiar with:
Visual Distractions
This involves any distraction that may result in the driver taking his or her eyes off the road. The most common example of this type of distraction is when a driver is watching while driving. Sounds irresponsible, right? But these scenarios exist. With your phone right at your side, or even when your companion watches a funny video on Facebook – you just won’t be able to resist and you’ll end up taking a glance.
Manual Distractions
Manual distractions mean anything that involves the action of taking your hands off the wheel. I know what you’re thinking – yes, your phone is the usual suspect once again. One-handed driving while the other hand is busy scrolling down or swiping left or right – that can cause serious trouble if you happen to chance upon an anticipated road scenario. Of course, it’s not just about using your phones.
There are other forms of manual distractions, but really, I cannot think of any other reason why I would take my hands off the wheel if not to take a call or reply to a comment on one of my social media phones. Yeah, laws have been passed against using phones while on the road, but we all know how drivers can easily ignore this, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Cognitive Distractions
Now, this last type of distraction is hard to detect because only the driver knows what’s going on in their head. Anything that can take your mind off what’s ahead of you is considered a cognitive distraction. You could be thinking about an unresolved argument, a deadline that you need to meet, or fantasizing about your date the previous night. Whatever that is, wandering thoughts are dangerous while driving, so you need to stop that and focus on the road.
Your Phone is Not Your Friend on the Road
Cellular phones have only been with us for about 20 years, but in that time, they’ve already shown how dangerous they can be when people get too involved in using the device and not paying attention to the road. This is especially true with the texting system that requires people to type out messages using the virtual keyboard on their phone. By necessity, this forces people to divide their attention between what’s happening on the road and what’s happening on their phones.
In recent years, things have gotten worse because of just how versatile a modern smartphone is. Now it’s more than just texting that we use our phones for. People can watch videos, shoot videos, take pictures, and use all kinds of social media. When you’ve got that kind of temptation sitting on a handheld device with the threat of monotony on the road, it’s easy to give in and start using your device. But once you go down that road of multi-tasking while driving a vehicle at high speeds, mistakes that you make become magnified. Sometimes it can result in narrowly avoided accidents, other times, injuries, sometimes permanent can be the result, and other times, people can die.
48 & Counting
Because of this, most of the states in the USA have passed laws against using your phone while you’re on the road, especially for texting. Only two states currently don’t have a texting law, Montana and Missouri (except for people under the age of 21). If you live in any other state, it’s now against the law.
However, the big problem here is one of perception. A few decades and many pointlessly lost lives have driven home just how dangerous drunk driving is. It also helps that the legal system comes down very harshly on people who are charged with drunk driving, so the public feeling about it has shifted from, “everyone does it,” to knowing that it’s dangerous and wrong.
Distracted driving isn’t like that. At least not yet. In some states, if you are caught texting while driving, you get a fine, similar to a speeding ticket. In other states, you can only be charged with distracted driving as a “secondary offense,” meaning you have to be breaking the law in some other primary way, such as speeding or driving erratically, and the distracted driving charge can add onto that.
Of course, the other problem with distracted driving is that while some forms of it are targeted by the law, such as texting on your phone, there are still plenty of other ways that distracted driving can take form.
Losing Focus
Probably one of the most famous recent cases of distracted driving that doesn’t involve using a phone took place on June 9th, 1999. In the state of Maine, America’s biggest, best-selling author, Stephen King, was taking his daily walk, sticking to the side of the road. He was hit by a car when the driver turned around for a few seconds to keep his dogs under control. Stephen King took the full brunt of the impact from the car, and suffered severe injuries, to the point where he contemplated retirement. Fortunately, he didn’t, but the damage was done. The man who hit him, Bryan Edwin Smith, suffered a ruined reputation that haunted him till the end of his life which was, unfortunately just a year later, when he was found dead in his home from a painkiller overdose.
Distracted driving can take a lot of different forms. Even concentrating too much on eating or music can be trouble, though one of the biggest culprits are children or animals sucking focus away from the road. The biggest danger with distracted driving is just how easy it is to do it. Drunk driving takes a bit of time, and these days there’s quite a lot of resistance from others to try to prevent someone clearly drunk from getting into a car and hitting the road. But when it’s your friends, in the car with you, who decide that it’s time to sing a song together, shoot it on video and post it to social media, the only thing anyone is thinking at that point is how cool and fun this is going to be, not, “Are we endangering other people on the road right now?”
So just keep in mind, while we pride ourselves in the 21st century on being multi-taskers, the number of accidents and fatalities that happen every year in America from distracted driving prove that we’re not as good at it as we’d like to think we are. Don’t be the one that causes an accident just because you find Twitter or Facebook more important than what’s going on right outside your car.