Drivers aren’t always on their own when they are taking their vehicle out on the roads; sometimes, they have passengers.
There are some added safety concerns for a driver when they have passengers in their vehicle. One of these concerns is making sure their passengers are safe. Another is making sure their passengers or their interactions with their passengers aren’t causing them to be distracted behind the wheel.
Some might be tempted to think that talking with passengers and other things related to passengers really do not have that high of a potential to be a dangerous driving distraction. However, recent statistics point to such an assumption being quite wrong. In fact, these statistics indicate that passenger-related distractions are a factor in a majority of distracted driving crashes.
The statistics are from federal data on distracted driving crashes. According to these statistics, drivers talking with passengers was a factor in well over half (57 percent) of such accidents. And this was not the only passenger-related thing the statistics indicate played a role in distracted driving accidents. Around 7 percent of such crashes were found to have distractions caused by passenger actions as a contributing factor.
Why do you think passenger-related distractions are such a common distracted driving accident cause?
Given the capacity for passenger-related distractions to cause accidents, one hopes that, here in Louisiana:
- Drivers will make sure to acknowledge that their passengers could potentially be distracting to them and take care to ensure that their interactions with passengers are not causing them to lose focus on driving.
- Passengers will take care to avoid engaging in conduct, verbal or physical, that could result in the driver of the vehicle they are in becoming distracted.
What things do you think would best help get the importance of avoiding passenger-related driving distractions across to drivers and passengers?
Source: The Washington Post, “This surprising activity is more dangerous than using your phone while driving,” Jacob Bogage, June 23, 2016
