Bad Driving Experience when Using Mobile Phones

Almost all of us or everyone in this room have been guilty of texting and driving at some point. We simply read a text message and reply. We think that we are quickly replying and still glance at the road and nothing will happen. That is not always the case, we just get lucky that time until one day we don’t. A women of the age 26 experienced this first hand. She was texting and driving and drifted off the road. There were 3 kids walking on the side of that road. She struck them, killing 2 girls age 14 and seriously injured a 15 year old boy. Her making the decision to text and drive costed these poor families the lives of their loved ones and not to mention she was also sentenced to 6 years in jail so it also costed her the life she at to an extent. This act forever changed all of there lives and the families have to live everyday with the grief but the women who caused the wreck lives with regret, pain, and blames herself.

See we make an allusion that we are simply texting and nothing will happen to us, but that’s not always true. Every time we make this decision we put not only our lives but the lives of others at risk. Tonight I want to tell you the types of distractions that occur while you text and drive, so that once you leave tonight you will finally make the decision to quit once and for all. While driving it is very important to pay attention to the road and your surroundings but when you decide to text and drive you are creating manual, visual, and cognitive distraction.

When you are driving and make the choice to remove your hand or both from the steering wheel to use your cell phone, you are creating a manual distraction. Removing your hands from the wheel is dangerous because your hands are what you use to control the direction your car goes. Once you remove your hands it will allow the car to start going into another lane or off the road and this can result in an accident. This is why it is important to not text or talk on the cell phone while driving.

When you decide to read an email, reply to a text, or scroll through social media while driving this causes you to look at something other than what is in front of you which is the road. This is referred to as a visual distraction because you are no longer using your eyes to drive you are now looking at something else. When you are replying to a text message and driving you look at your phone for an average of 5 seconds before looking at the road again and depending on how fast you are driving you will drive a football fields length before you see the road again. This means you are more likely to wreck since you drive such a long distance without watching where you are going.

Cognitive distractions occur while texting and driving because your mind is no longer focused on driving instead you are focused on your phone. The message you received now has your full attention not the road. This type if distraction also occurs when you talking on the phone too. You may be looking at the road but your mind is thinking about some complete other thing than the road, so you are zoned out. The result of this could makes you more likely to wreck than you are when not using your phone.

Although we all have used our cell phones while driving now is the time we all decide our lives and the lives of others are more important than our phones. Risking our lives and lives of others just to use our phones is not the best option and can result in a bad outcome. We can make the decision today to wait until we have arrived to our destination to use our phones. We can wait 5 more minutes or we can make the life altering decision to use 5 seconds on our phones and change the lives of everyone’s families by an accident.

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