DRIVING WHILE STUPID

Driving While Stupid

Driving While Stupid

Introduction

Driving on the road requires greater attention and fall short of the required attention could be fatal to both car occupants and pedestrians. This is also due to the increasing number of cases distracted and negligent driving.

Discussion

In today's fast paced world, it is very common to see drivers making a call, talking, sending and reading messages from their mobile phones or any other communication device, while driving. Despite the productivity benefits offered by these activities attract drivers and employees; research shows that adding a secondary activity to the task primary driving is risky.

In a study, conducted by the Technological Institute of the State Transportation Virginia, U.S. in 100 vehicles equipped with video cameras to monitoring the behavior of drivers showed that inattention driver is a factor of consideration in most crashes and near misses. The Findings indicated that nearly 80% of all crashes and 65% of all accidents responded to driver inattention within three seconds the occurrence of the accident (Lissy, 2000). The main causes of this lack of driver attention related to distracting activities, such as cell phone use and drowsiness.

It was also found that, drivers who often engage in distracting activities were likely to experience a crash or near crash related to the lack of attention. Despite these findings, researchers are still struggling to learn the precise role distractions, because it is difficult to prove distraction was the cause of a shock. In other recent studies on the role played by cell phone use the causality of the shocks, the results indicated that drivers who were using a cell phone while driving were four times more likely crash. However, cell phone use appears related to the shock by association because there was no certainty that such activity was the cause of accidents.

It has ...