It’s past your lunchtime, and you haven’t eaten, and yet have been driving from appointment to appointment. You attempt to keep sane by looking for a good song on the radio and fitting in a little fast food while you try to make it to your next meeting. Your cell phone rings, or beeps with an app notification. Your intent is to drive safely, courteously and in a law-abiding fashion, but each of these distractions have the potential to cause an accident.

Even with the best intentions – any distraction, no matter how small, can impact our safety and those around us.

As is taught in drivers’ education classes, driving requires multiple skills… Attention, Focus, Coordination, and Quick Decision-Making.  And each of these can become compromised if a driver becomes the slightest bit distracted — making it a higher risk for being involved in a car accident. Distracted driving is extremely dangerous. Every year distracted drivers cause thousands of accidents on our roads and highways.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA):

People under the age of 20 are involved in more fatal crashes caused by distractions than any other age group and when a driver talks on a cell phone, reaction time is delayed in the same way as if the driver were drunk.

One problem is that many drivers don’t consider themselves distracted while driving. People, and especially seasoned drivers, assume that they can multi-task without losing concentration. This may be true outside the vehicle, but changes immediately once a person gets behind the wheel. Drivers must remain focused and ready to respond to the actions of other drivers, road conditions, and unforeseen circumstances. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that the average text pulls the driver’s eyes away from the road for five seconds. At 55 miles an hour, a car will travel the length of a football field in that time.

So what exactly is distracted driving?

According to the CDC there are three main types of distraction:

Visual: taking your eyes off the road;

Manual: taking your hands off the wheel; and

Cognitive: taking your mind off of driving.

It is defined as any activity that occurs while operating a motor vehicle that could divert a person’s focus away from the essential task of driving. This results in risky behavior that endangers the lives of drivers, their passengers, other drivers and pedestrians. Distracted driving includes the following actions:

• Talking to or reacting to other passengers in the car
• Adjusting the music, such as a radio, CD player, or MP3 player
• Eating or drinking while driving
• Making or receiving phone calls
• Texting or reading a text
• Putting on lipstick, applying make-up, fixing your hair or shaving
• Using a map and navigation apps on their phones.

The CDC also reports that drivers most at risk tend to be young adults and teen drivers. “Drivers under the age of 20 have the highest proportion of distraction-related fatal crashes.”

Texting while driving is the most dangerous distracted driving activity because it combines all three types of driving distraction (visual, manual and cognitive).

In Virginia, it is illegal to text while driving. And if you are under the age of 18, it is illegal to use your phone at all while driving.

Studies conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration demonstrate a direct relationship between driver inattention and automobile accidents. Just glancing away from the roadway for more than two seconds can double your risk of a crash or near crash. Engaging in more complex visual or manual tasks while driving can raise that risk even higher. 

Everyone knows that drinking and driving is wrong, but very few people have a full understanding of how focusing on other activities while driving is equally as dangerous. Talking on the phone, texting, fixing makeup in the mirror, adjusting music on the radio, eating and drinking, and talking to passengers in the car also put drivers and passengers at risk for potential accidents.

According to AAA, federal estimates suggest that distraction contributes to 16% of all fatal crashes, leading to around 5,000 deaths every year.   Latest research has discovered that distraction “latency” lasts an average of 27 seconds, meaning that, even after drivers put down the phone or stop fiddling with the navigation system, drivers aren’t fully engaged with the driving task.

Education is key. One of the best ways to end distracted driving is to make people aware of the dangers.  By improving our understanding of how mental and physical distractions impair drivers and by educating the public about avoiding distractions, we can eliminate these needless deaths.