As Heather drove to the Cincinnati photography studio, she was thinking about how she wanted to appear in her photos. As a graduating upperclassman in her high school, she was excited to be getting her senior pictures taken and was eagerly anticipating the finished product. As she made her way through the heavy traffic she was thinking about the three different outfits she had brought along to change into and also she was concerned about her new haircut and how well it would look in the finished products. As she came to a traffic light she was not paying attention and discovered belatedly that the car up ahead had come to a halt and she saw brake lights coming up very fast in her line of vision. Heather braked quickly but was unable to stop in time and the next thing she knew she had plowed into the car in front of her. There were no injuries but she was very frightened and the inconvenience of having to deal with the other driver and contacting her insurance company to report the accident.
A lot of bad choices can be the root of a car crash but the major one is inattention just as the above story illustrates. This can be precipitated in many ways but the four most frequent contributors are:
1. Talking on a cell phone – There is no way to know how many accidents have been caused because a person was talking on his or her cell phone and was paying attention to the conversation rather than concentrating on the road. It is tempting to use travel time to conduct conversations but it is a perilous activity to try to do two things at once and do them well.
2. Texting – This is a fairly recent habit that many people participate in and is recognized to be a very dangerous and risky thing to do.Teenagers especially are prone to receive and answer a text message while behind the wheel and that combined with driving inexperience makes them very vulnerable to having an accident.
3. Eating – Eating while driving a car can take attention away from the task at hand because multi-tasking in this way is messy and dangerous. When people spill food or soft drinks on their clothing, it frequently causes a knee jerk reaction to take care of the problem and taking their eyes off of the road for even that brief amount of time can result in an unfortunate situation.
4. Consuming alcohol – Sadly, this is so commonplace that people are no longer surprised when they find out that an accident involves one or the other parties who have been drinking before getting behind the wheel. The effects are many times shown in the way of reduced focusing ability, slow response times and poor judgment through bad driving decisions that are made while a person is under the influence of alcohol. It is a familiar reality that a great deal of car crashes are caused by people who have made the unfortunate choice to drink and then drive even though there are many efforts being made to educate the public that this is a deadly decision to many drivers.
