Everyone can say they are a safe driver. But we are all humans and distractions are everywhere. These distractions are an important factor in causing dangerous situations on the road. You want to change the music. You want to pick up your phone after you hear the notification sound to check who just messaged you. Or you want to change the navigation because you realized you still need to pass by that store or that friend. These occurrences drastically increase your reaction time, and this can mean the difference between life, critical injury or even death, especially when cars in front or behind you are at a close distance, if someone just decided to cross the road or when an emergency vehicle suddenly appears around the corner.
In this essay I do not want to teach people a lesson. I will reflect at my own driving behavior, focusing on the risks of distractions. I would say I am a safe driver who gets disturbed by other people in traffic distracting themselves. But of course, I must admit I can get distracted as well. When I am in a traffic jam, or on a straight road for an extended amount of time, I sometimes check my phone quickly. Sometimes I change the navigation or music when driving. This has happened to me occasionally in the past couple of years. Not often, but still, I wish I would never do this. This made me want to think creatively about ways which can change my behavior structurally.
What I decided to do is become even more mindful of my surroundings by treating myself as if I were in driving school again. ‘’What is the car in front of me doing?’’, ‘’Is there enough space behind me if I have to break instantly?’’ and ‘’Am I in the right lane if I have to exit the highway soon?’’ were just some of the questions I kept trying to answer while in the car. It seems like something so normal but after you drive for a long time, you start to drive more and more on autopilot.
I realized that this focus cannot stay with me for an entire drive, especially if this lasts a couple of hours. I decided I needed another solution for these long drives and realized that having people in the car more often is beneficial. Being social with your friends and family, people who you trust and feel comfortable with, will make you forget about all these distractions, especially the phone. Making them select the music and navigation made driving feel so much safer, as well as more fun. Even better was that they could see certain things I cannot see. For example, when turning right, the have a better view of the blind spot. And when I would get tired and react slower after being distracted, it was time to ask them to take the wheel for a bit.
The last thing that helped me is to talk to friends and family about these distractions, discussing how they experience it. It made me realize that they got distracted more often than me and did not always realize the consequences. But when I told them about the lowering of reaction time that could lead to serious accidents, they told me they never thought about this, which showed me they were getting more aware of the dangers. This was even more effective in practical situations. For example, when I would accompany them in the car and they tried to control the music or the navigation themselves, I would stop them and told them I would do it for them. Sometimes, all you need is some social control when trying to address societal issues, like minimizing distractions while driving a car.
Thinking about this topic and writing this essay made me realize once again that driving a car means you are in control of a vehicle which can do serious damage to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers. Overestimating your driving skills is something that can happen easily. Since I am used to driving in The Netherlands, and I will drive in a foreign country, I will be even more aware of my surroundings when driving in the USA, since the routes I will drive will be new, traffic rules can be new to me and the general behavior on the road is something I have to get adapted to. I think this will be beneficial to me because it will force me again to go back to the ‘’driving school mode’’ I described before, making me more mindful of my surroundings while driving.