The war on distracted driving continues
According to
a new AAA survey, 75 percent of Georgia participants witnessed some type of distracted driving in the form of texting
and/or talking. The Hands-Free Georgia Act took effect on July 1 so now, we are
still in the learning curve phase. The bigger question is, will we as Georgians
ever get out of the learning curve phase? Only time will tell. What is the
answer to this dilemma? Increased patrols? Higher fines when distracted drivers
get caught? There’s no doubt that this law is tough for authorities to enforce,
so I suppose, we need to rely on overall cultural change.
When
it comes to texting and driving, I like to loosely quote the band Chicago, “You’re
a hard habit to break.” Let’s face the fact that most of society has an
addiction of one form or another with their Smartphones which honestly do so
much for us these days including talking, texting, Facebooking, Twittering,
Snapchatting, banking, exercise tracking, traffic navigating, video viewing and
much more. That dependency will only grow as technology continues to advance.
Still,
safety advocates say that any phone use while driving is dangerous. Even if one
is a decent multi-tasker, a part of the mind is taken off the task of driving.
I’m not sure if I agree with that assessment. Some folks can handle more tasks
at once than others. It seems that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to
this issue. Some could argue that operating the radio, MP3 player or even that
old piece of tech, the CD player – is all a distraction. Others argue that
looking around at other drivers to see if they’re distracted, is a distraction
in and of itself! Again, the word balance is key here.
For
me, with the phone mounted in a good place, one can take calls and use apps
like Waze to get around town. Still, I do my best to limit the time that I use
the app.
How
can we peacefully co-exist with our environment and technology? Now, there
doesn’t seem to be a solution. Is there anything good that has come out of the
new distracted driving law? According to that very AAA survey, a whopping 98
percent of the participants claimed that they are aware of the law’s existence.
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