Take a second, save a life | Blogs

Apr 10

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Take a second, save a life

Sat 10 Apr 2010 07:15:01 | 0 comments

In addition to making my children need a life-long therapy program, I am a safety professional. Meaning, Health and Safety is my job, it's what I do for a living. Currently I over see the health and safety of about 8,000 employees, soon to jump to about 24,000 but that's beside the point. I'm breaking away for just a second from my (sad) attempt at humor in hopes of reaching someone and maybe changing a behavior of one person in order to save a life.

I was reading a blog post over at Parenting Squad that said if you text and drive, my kids aren't riding with you. I can't tell you how important this is. I've seen first hand the dangers of texting and driving. There was a huge long study done at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute that the NY Times Reported on back in September 2009. In case you don't have time to read the PDF report or times article, texting and driving increases your risk for a crash by a factor of 23. Just look at the science behind it. You're driving 40 MPH, that means your moving about 60 feet per second. If you look down to read a text, glance up, glance back down pop in a few letters, glance up, glance back down, pop a few more, you've taking your eyes of the road for about 4.6 seconds out of 6. That means you've gone about 276 feet while banging out that text message - almost the length of a football field. You add the other 1.5 seconds it takes for your brain to react to a dangerous situation and actually get your foot on the brake you can add 90 feet, a total of 366 feet to stop the car because you were sending a text instead of driving.

The human brain is only capable of doing one thing at a time. You can think one thought at a time, you can say one word at a time, you can type one thing at a time. You can do lots of things back to back really fast, but you can only do them one at a time - like me, just now, talking to my wife while typing this, I almost typed "hey babe" instead of "word at a time" back there. So when you're driving - you're either driving or your not.

Take your pick.

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