317.582.0000DISTRACTED DRIVING CAN CAUSE CATASTROPHIC PERSONAL INJURY
As a personal injury attorney dealing in auto accident cases for more than forty years, I can share with you an extremely disturbing truth: While catastrophic and permanent loss may result from equipment error, all too often the real cause is – distracted driving.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration defines distraction as anything that takes your attention away from the task of driving the vehicle. Distractions might include:
- talking on the phone
- texting
- eating and drinking
- talking to people in the vehicle
- adjusting temperature controls
- fiddling with the radio
- adjusting the navigation on the phone or in the car
According to EndDD, those driver distractions fall into three main categories:
- Manual (where you move your hands from the wheel)
- Visual (where you focus your eyes away from the road)
- Cognitive (where your mind wanders away from the task of driving)
Driving a 1.5 ton metal vehicle at 60 miles per hour is essentially a life-threatening experience, Neale Martin points out in a Ted Talks video, but we’ve become so used to doing that that we become complacent and bored. Many Americans, he says, spend 18-20 hours each week in our vehicles.
Neuroscientist Carl Marci conducted a test using a single driver on a ten minute trip in a late-model compact car in Boston. The testing technology included head-mounted eye tracking and biometric sensing devices, which measured the driver’s every eye movement and her emotional level of engagement. The results: the driver looked away from the road more than 7X every minute, with some tasks occupying as many as ten rapid glances back and forth. (There was NO texting – the distractions came from changing climate control and navigating!)
Wouldn’t it be tragic if you were to cause injury or even death to innocent people because you were distracted from the task of safe driving? And, if you or your passengers were to sustain injuries in a car accident, wouldn’t you be enraged, knowing those injuries were preventable – if only the driver had not been distracted by texting, eating, or adjusting the controls?
If in fact you are involved in an accident – whatever the cause – it’s crucial that you contact an Indiana personal injury lawyer right away. When insurance isn’t enough to compensate for your loss, our firm is there to see you get the recovery you deserve.
