Texting While Driving: “It’s Like Everybody’s Drunk” Or Worse
A mentor recently mentioned in passing that he stopped riding motorcycle when cellphones came out, as he noticed the average driver distraction level had gone way up. He said, “It’s like everybody’s drunk.”
There’s lots of ways to be an impaired driver: Physical or mental fatigue, chemicals (legal and not), emotional extremes, etc. (This is not an exhaustive list). What I want to focus on here is a very controllable risk factor: Divided attention.
A quick Internet search turned up some original research from Car and Driver on the subject of texting while driving compared with actual alcohol-impaired driving, and the results are shockingly worse than I would have thought. From their (admittedly limited but well done) study, texting is way worse than being at the legal alcohol limit when it comes to both reading and writing. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*