If you text and drive, consider this. When you are driving at 55 miles per hour and look down to text for five seconds, you will drive the length of a football field while your eyes are off the road.  A lot can happen in that time. Texting and driving is just one aspect of the larger picture - distracted driving.  It was linked to almost 3,000 lost lives in 2018.   What is really unbelievable - almost 40% of distracted driving victims were passengers, pedestrians, or cyclists. Distracted driving does not just endanger the person behind the wheel but everyone else around them. 

Distracted driving can actually be broken into three categories, visual, manual, and cognitive.  Visual is taking your eyes off the road.  Manual is anything that takes your hands off the wheel, and cognitive is anything that takes your mind off of driving.  Sure, all of us are guilty are taking our eyes off the road to see a view, or taking our hands off to play with the radio, or letting our mind wander while we drive.  What makes texting and driving so dangerous is it involves all three of these distractions for every text message.  There are laws in place to prevent people from texting and driving, but like many road rules, they can be hard to reinforce if no one is around to stop us.  Committing to no texting while driving starts with drivers being informed on the dangers of distracted driving and taking it upon themselves to not harm the people around them.

Here are some tips to avoid distracted driving and protect yourself and others on the road.

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