April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month.
This is the month when the Department of Transportation would like to remind people that they are just not as safe when they are using any kind of electronic devices while driving.
At Wipple we are passionate about getting your business online. We want you to find customers from you websites. We want to build you those websites. We want to help you maintain those websites. We want the search engines to put you right on top of the list. We know we can do that. BUT and this is a big BUT, we don’t want any of the web searching done while you are driving.
Distracted driving is a deadly epidemic on our nation’s roadways.
What are the dangers? Drivers who use hand-held devices are 4 times more likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves. Text messaging creates a crash risk 23 times worse than driving while not distracted. Sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, the equivalent-at 55 mph-of driving the length of an entire football field, blind.
A driver’s response to sudden hazards, such as another driver’s behavior, weather conditions, work zones, animals or objects in the roadway, often is the critical factor between a crash and a nearcrash.
When the brain is experiencing an increased workload, information processing slows and a driver is much less likely to respond to unexpected hazards in time to avoid a crash.
The industrial ergonomics field has been able to identify physical workload limits and, in the same way, the workload limits of our brains now are being identified. The challenge to the general public is the bottlenecks and limits of the brain are more difficult to feel and literally see than physical limits.
Multitasking Impairs Performance
We can safely walk while chewing gum in a city crowded with motor vehicles and other hazards. That is because one of those tasks – chewing gum – is not a cognitively demanding task. When chewing gum and talking, people still are able to visually scan the environment for ootential hazards:
• Light poles along the sidewalk
• Boxes suddenly pushed out a doorway at ground level before the delivery man emerges
• Moving vehicles hidden by parked vehicles
• Small dog on a leash
• Uneven sidewalk
People do not perform as well when trying to perform two attention-demanding tasks at the same time.32 Research shows even pedestrians don’t effectively monitor their environment for safety while talking on cell phones.
The challenge is managing two tasks demanding our cognitive attention.
Please, make your life and the lives of those around your safer by remaining distracted while driving.
Call Wipple, (888) 947-7537 for help with a website. Just don’t do it while driving.
Ref: http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/Distracted_Driving