Sad or Mad? Stay Out of the Car!

We’ve all heard “Don’t Drink and Drive.” But did you know that “Don’t Sad and Drive” might be nearly as important?

A new study from researchers at Virginia Tech Transportation Institute finds that drivers increase their crash risk nearly tenfold when they get behind the wheel while observably angry, sad, crying or emotionally agitated.

The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute researchers, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also reported that drivers more than double their crash risk when they choose to engage in distracting activities that require them to take their eyes off the road, such as using a handheld cell phone, reading or writing, or using touchscreen menus on a vehicle instrument panel. And, according to the institute’s research, drivers engage in some type of distracting activity more than 50 percent of the time they are driving.

“These findings are important because we see a younger population of drivers, particularly teens, who are more prone to engaging in distracting activities while driving,” said Tom Dingus, lead author of the study and director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. “Our analysis shows that, if we take no steps in the near future to limit the number of distracting activities in a vehicle, those who represent the next generation of drivers will only continue to be at greater risk of a crash.”

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute researchers used results from the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study, the largest light-vehicle naturalistic driving study ever conducted with more than 3,500 participants across six data collection sites in the United States.

The study represents the largest naturalistic crash database available to date, with more than 1,600 verified crash events ranging in severity from low, such as tire and curb strikes, to severe, including police-reportable crashes.

While previous naturalistic driving data analyses required combining crash data with “surrogate” crashes – or near-crashes and minor collisions – to determine driver risk, the magnitude of the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study facilitates the first crash-only analysis, resulting in the most conclusive findings to date of the biggest risks faced by drivers today, the researchers said.

Read more at EHSToday.com