Monic Ductan
English 1101
October 16, 2013
Is There a Solution to the Dangers of Distracted Driving? Recently “Texas college student Chance Bothe’s last words prior to driving his truck off a cliff were in the form of a text message: “I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident.” He miraculously survived, but Bothe’s story has become an ironic example of the dangers of texting while driving” (Zafar). Distracted driving has become a worldwide problem that is ending/injuring the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year. “A statistic from 2009 declares that in the United States alone 5,474 people were killed on roadways and an additional estimate of 448,000 were injured in motor vehicle …show more content…
Which is “by far the most alarming distraction while driving because it requires visual, manual, and cognitive attention from the driver,” (What is Distracted Driving) consequently meaning all three aspect which should always be focused on the road are taken away making the driver almost blind and oblivious to the road. Texting while operating a vehicle is positively the worst distraction because it has been calculated by scientists that when a driver is “sending or receiving a text message he or she takes their eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, the equivalent of this, at fifty-five miles per hour, is driving the length of a football field” (Distracted Driving 2009). Just imagine how many things could go wrong in that amount of road, especially at that speed a great deal of serious damage and possibly even death could result from just that one text message. However, there are also many other devices and actions the driver may partake in to diverge his or her attention away from the road such as “ using cell phone or smart phone, eating and drinking, talking to a passenger, grooming, reading (including maps), using a navigation system, watching a video and adjusting a radio, CD player or MP3 player” (What is Distracted Driving). All these activities are common among every person while driving. Some of these activities being so common for people to do in a car, that some do not even think of them as distracting while operating a motor vehicle, especially the ones where the driver is only eating, drinking or just talking to the passenger. But when we think about it after hearing so many of these statistics we can see how many elements that are crucial to driving can be impaired by some simple multi tasking by the driver to save some time through their day or just making naïve