What Does Texting While Driving Really Do To Us?
Article By: Scott Marshall
Scott Marshall is Director of Training for Young Drivers of Canada. He was a judge on the first 3 seasons of Canada’s Worst Driver on Discovery Network. Scott started writing columns on driving for his community paper since 2005. Since then his columns have been printed in several publications including newspaper, magazines and various web-sites. You can visit his own blog at http://safedriving.wordpress.com.
Okay, we’ve all heard over the past number of years that texting and driving should never mix. We keep getting told this yet many drivers still do this. Maybe there’s something they aren’t getting. Maybe they have a higher opinion of their ability than they should. With this in mind, let’s take a look at texting and driving and what many people haven’t thought of.
Let’s start out with how we drive. The first part to safe driving comes from your mind. Your mind needs to be on the driving task each and every second you’re behind the wheel. There are constant changes within our driving environment that will challenge the driver’s ability on a regular basis. If your mind is absent for just a few seconds at the wrong time, serious situations can develop.
Your mind then tells your eyes where to look to drive safely. You will always need to keep moving your eyes to keep you aware of all of the changes of the driving environment. Once your eyes pick out the information, they send a message back to your mind to tell your hands and feet what to do next. When we hear about “hand – eye” co-ordination, it really should be called “eye – hand” co-ordination since what you perceive with your eyes comes before the actions of your hands.
Now that we've straightened that out, throw in texting while driving. Once you take your mind away from driving, it takes a bit of time to get re-focused on driving once that distraction is removed. Looking at a text message is one thing, but once you read it, your mind isn't on driving at all. It’s on that “important” message you just received.
Driving at 50 km/h, your vehicle will travel approximately 14 metres in one second. If you look down at your phone to just glance at a text for 3 seconds, you’ve traveled over 40 metres without looking where you want to go and without thinking about driving. What if you were sending the text? Wouldn't that take you longer to complete and keep your eyes and mind off the driving task longer still? Of course it will.
It’s very clear that texting while driving causes a mental disengagement from driving – your mind stops thinking about driving tasks. Since you’ll drive better with your mind on driving, what can you do to stop this temptation of texting while driving? The solutions are simple enough. Put your phone in a place that you can’t get to it. Place it in your purse or backpack and place that in the trunk. Turn off your phone. This way you won’t hear when you get a text message. If you need to send or read a text, either pull over to do so or better yet, let your passenger send the text. They can afford to focus on that and let you focus on driving. That’s your job as the driver.