“Watch where you’re going!”: Driving distracted

by Rebekah Bovenmyer

You know what it’s like driving to a new, unfamiliar place, like a new job or another town’s football field. Your mind is on the map and the street signs. You don’t want to get lost.

One afternoon I was trying to get to a friend’s house in a city I didn’t know well. At each intersection, I debated: left, right, or straight? I had a vague notion of the city’s layout, but I was watching street signs and biting my nails the whole way.

Coming to a street I recognized, I swerved into the left-turning lane. The light turned green, and I started turning, despite the huge conversion van bearing down the street toward me.

Crunch! I slammed on the brakes. Glass shattered in my back window where the van had plowed into the right rear passenger door.

My car was totaled. In all my worry about finding my way, I had forgotten to yield to oncoming traffic. I had to go to court and pay several hundred dollars. But I was lucky that no one was hurt.

Distractions galore

That’s one way of being distracted while driving, but there are a lot more—and some that are even weirder (and some that you could probably guess). The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety studied 400 crash reports in 1997 and 1998 to find what distracted drivers before they crashed:

• seeing parachutes in the sky
• swerving for elk in the road
• fighting with a passenger
• adjusting a CD
• having a dog hit the steering wheel
• dislodging an object that rolled under the brake pedal
• swatting a bee flying in the vehicle
• reaching for a water bottle
• adjusting a seat belt
• eating a burger
• drinking coffee
• having a cigarette blow back into the vehicle
• looking for a parking space
• looking at a map

Amazing, isn’t it, all the things that can happen while we’re driving? That was 10 years ago. Now we have cell phones, iPods, and DVDs in the car, too. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration estimates that 25% of all car crashes happen because drivers are distracted. Other researchers say it’s closer to 90%.

“There’s an old saying that eyes are 99% of driving,” says Rodney Van Wyk, former police officer and president and CEO of Drive Tek, a driver’s education provider. “Driving requires a lot of multitasking and eye, hand, and foot coordination. You need a lot of concentration.”

And a lot of practice. Van Wyk says that it takes about 30,000 miles of driving before someone moves into a less risky category of drivers.

Distractions of cell phones

Even though anything that takes our attention away from the road ahead could be considered a distraction, one of the most common—and preventable—is talking or texting on a cell phone.

A survey by Zogby International shows that 2/3 of 18 to 24-year-olds text while driving. It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that looking down for several seconds at a time to type on a tiny keypad is dangerous.

An 18-year-old woman in Arizona drifted across the lane and into oncoming traffic in August, killing herself and another driver. Police found that a text message had been sent from the teen’s phone at the exact time of the head-on crash.

What about just talking on the phone and not texting?

If you’re talking on the phone, your eyes are on the road, but your mind isn’t. We all know we can look like we’re paying attention when we’re not. The same thing is happening when drivers talk on a phone.

Researchers at the University of Utah found that drivers that are talking on a cell phone are only really paying attention to 50% of the road in front of them. They also found that drivers talking on a cell phone took 20% longer to brake when they needed to, even though they were driving slower.

Talking on a cell phone while driving makes you 4 times more likely to get in a crash. 

In fact, driving while talking on a cell phone is just as dangerous as driving with a blood alcohol level of .08, according to a study by the University of Utah.

Several states are trying to pass laws to make it illegal for teens to use cell phones while driving. But research shows that using cell phones while driving is dangerous for everyone, not just teens.

What you can do

Car crashes happen in seconds, in milliseconds. Any number of things can happen to distract you from the road in front of you and cause a crash.

How can you minimize your risk of being distracted? Here are some ideas:

• Turn off your phone before you get behind the wheel so you won’t be tempted.
• Pull over to look at a map or make a call.
• Don’t drive with a large group of friends. Research shows that your risks for a crash increase with the number of passengers you have.
• If you’re tired or having trouble focusing, pull over and take a break from driving.
• Put in a CD or plug in your iPod before you start or ask a passenger to do it for you.

Some distractions can’t be helped, like if your tire blows out or a bee flies into the car. Others you can control. Luckily, I was wearing my seatbelt when I crashed. But if I’d looked up directions before I left, instead of trying to figure it out on the way, I might have prevented it from happening at all.