Blog of a discontent conforming noncomformist

Let's just face it: Teenagers driving while talking on cell phones is just an accident waiting to happen. Even worse than is teenagers texting messaging while driving.

I would like to bring up an earlier post here. The young person, shall we say, thinks that not getting in a collision or getting a ticket makes him a good driver. But in fact, it just goes to show that he has just been lucky. In his opinion, when he talks on the phone, he thinks his driving has not been hampered in any way. He thinks that statistics mean nothing, that there is nothing wrong with driving and talking on the cell phone. How wrong can you be? I myself have nearly been run over on the bike path riding my bicycle home by teenagers using cell phones while they were driving. I would guess that all begins when they ride their bikes and using their cell phones. They have trouble watching there they are going.

Ford has studied this problem. They have developed the VIRtual Test Track EXperiment to monitor certain driving behaviors. Ford used to test the age difference while driving. The subjects used were teens and adults.

This experiment measured the response time with and without distractions. In the test without distractions, the miss rate forboth groups was roughly the same-3%. However, running the same test with distractions( hands-free cell phones), the miss rate for adults was 13%. The miss rate for teens was staggering higher. It was roughly 50%.

It just proves that most people tend to over-estimate their own ability to deal with distractions while driving a car.