You’ve seen the warnings on commercials and you have definitely heard it from your parents a billion times: don’t text and drive. But both seem second nature, so why not send a quick “I’ll be there soon” message?
Think about this: taking your eyes off the road for five seconds while moving at 55 miles per hour is equivalent to driving the length of a football field blind. Text messaging or surfing the web while driving makes you 23 times more likely to get involved in a crash.
Studies prove that although you might feel confident both as a driver and a texter, you While combining a visual and an audio task such as driving and talking on the phone is okay, doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task.
A study at Ohio State University used eye-tracking technology that showed that people’s gaze moved around much more when they had two visual tasks compared to a visual and an audio task, and spent much less time fixated on any one task. While texting makes a crash 23 times more likely, that’s significantly higher than dialing a number (2.8 times more likely) or talking on the phone (1.3 times more likely).
Whatever text you feel the urge to send while you’re driving can wait…and not until you’re at a red light, until you’ve reached your destination and your car is parked. You can’t argue with the science – texting slows down your reaction time and puts your life at risk.
[…] Driving is inherently visual; talking and listening is not. We can talk to others and drive with little impairment. But because texting is visual, “doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task” (source). […]
[…] Driving is inherently visual; talking and listening is not. We can talk to others and drive with little impairment. But because texting is visual, “doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task” (source). […]
[…] Driving is inherently visual; talking and listening is not. We can talk to others and drive with little impairment. But because texting is visual, “doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task” (source). […]
[…] Driving is inherently visual; talking and listening is not. We can talk to others and drive with little impairment. But because texting is visual, “doing two visual tasks at once, like texting and driving, drastically impairs how you perform each task” (source). […]