Main Cause of Road Accidents

If you are distracted, you can kill someone. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2017) estimates that more than three thousand people were killed resultant to distracted driving in 2017 alone. And that is before we even factor in non-fatal accidents, in which case distracted driving causes more than a thousand injuries every single day (CDC, 2020). The main harmfulness of automobiles and cause of road accidents is distracted driving.

Motor Vehicles are extremely powerful. While it is common knowledge that cars are physically made up of thousands of pounds of hard metals, rubbers, and plastics, the force of a vehicle in motion is not as well known. Newton’s second law defines force as mass times acceleration, which means that even a lightweight car weighing only a ton traveling at a middling speed of 60MPH will exert about 550 times its own weight (Banas, 2018). If you are in a crash, you are not experiencing just the weight of a vehicle; you are experiencing more than five hundred times that weight—tens of thousands of pounds.

Clearly, then, the safe operation of motor vehicles requires significant attention. Many laws already reflect this fact. The existence of driver’s licenses, periodic renewals with eye exams, laws against driving while inebriated, etc. only make sense if we keep in mind that inattentive operation of motor vehicles—whether purposeful or negligent—can be disastrous.

That is precisely why distracted driving is the main cause of road accidents. When individuals are texting, watching YouTube, or even answering their smartphone calls while driving, they are inattentive to the tens of thousands of pounds worth of force that they alone are responsible for controlling. This inattention can and has resulted in tragedy.

Vehicular harm is caused by distracted driving more than anything else. Cars generate an enormous amount of deadly force. To safely control that force, drivers must be keenly aware of what they are doing. But they lack that awareness when they are distracted by other matters like text messaging or some other mobile phone usage. We do not hesitate to create laws to prevent people who are intoxicated or who have poor eyesight from operating vehicles. Distracted driving is no better. Legislative changes are needed, nationwide, to clearly set a standard that distracted driving is deadly and dangerous. We need to get distracted drivers off the road.

References

Banas, T. (2018). How to calculate crash forces. Sciencing. https://sciencing.com/convert-horsepower-thrust-7649204.html

CDC. (2020). Distracted driving. https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/index.html

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (2017). Distracted driving. https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving