Forty percent of drivers are blind
This is a dramatic statement and one that immediately caught your attention...
The managing director of MasterDrive, Eugene Herbert, made this statement based on statistics that shows that 40% of all drivers, on average and at any given time, are on their phones while driving a car.
“The phenomenon of inattention blindness occurs when drivers use their phones while driving. A large portion of the drivers, or if drivers are willing to be honest, they themselves, drive over 90m every so often, with the same attention and vision capabilities of someone wearing a blindfold. A sobering thought.
“A driver experiencing inattention blindness can look straight at a stop sign or pedestrians, but not consciously register those items or individuals at all. Additionally, this distraction continues for a few seconds after one puts the phone down again. The question that needs to be asked: do you want to either be a driver like this or share the road with such a driver?”
Furthermore, Herbert said, “The World Health Organisation suggests that the growth in the use of cell phones in cars increased by up to 11% across a number of countries in the last five years.”
How often have you waited at a traffic light, just about ready to drive off when a driver from the left or right drove across the intersection against the red light? Or, the driver in front of you simply decided to ignore the stop sign of the traffic light despite there having been enough time to stop? We are not even talking about passing other vehicles against solid white lines or up blind hills. It is horrific!
Sometimes the aforementioned drivers do it phone in hand. If you “reprimand” the phone-in-hand driver next to you, you are often considered the idiot and you get shown the middle finger.
With all these distractions and dangers, one cannot afford to be distracted by your own phone. “In our ‘always-connected world’, messages continue to stream in even when driving. We all know the dangers of distracted driving, yet 88% of drivers risk it anyway.”
There is a tool that can curb the urge to grab your phone while driving. “ping is a patented voice-based app that eliminates the ‘urge’ to check phones by automatically reading WhatsApp, SMS, email and all other messages out loud, so drivers can stay focused on the roads.
Drivers reduce the stress of not knowing and avoid the frustration of missing a message that could change their plans. Save time, money and lives with MasterDrive and ping,” said Barrie Arnold.
Source: MotorPress
