What follows should come as absolutely no surprise to any of our readers who have passed drivers' education. According to a recent study, 4 out of every 5 crashes may be attributable to driver distraction. The work performed by the National Highway Transportation Safety Adminstration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, points out that approximately 80 percent of all crashes and 65 percent of "near-crashes" occur a mere three seconds after a driver becomes distracted. The most common distraction is - wait for it - the use of a mobile phone, which along with reading and applying make-up increases the chances of a crash by a factor of three. Reaching for a moving object brings with it a whopping nine-fold increase in the odds of experiencing a collision, and driving while drowsy quadruples the likelihood of a crash.
The parties involved in the study used instrumentation to track the driving behavior of 241 drivers for more than a year.
We here at Autoblog eagerly wait for the day when abritrary enforcement of speed limits is replaced with a system that punishes drivers who aren't paying attention to the task at hand.
[Source: CNN.com]
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