Imagine that you are driving home from work, dreaming of your delicious dinner which awaits you at your humble abode. All you have in mind is getting back there after an arduous and exhausting day at the office. But, unfortunately, the guy ahead of you has other plans. He is busy yapping away on his cell phone, holding up the traffic line when the light is green.
You know how it goes; You’re watching the traffic light turn from green, to yellow, to red, and this guy is in no hurry to move. While he’s busy talking, you are enraged at the fact that the light has turned green two different times already, and you are still sitting in the same spot, waiting to go! The Gorilla doesn’t know about you, but when this happens to him, he is annoyed and left wondering, “what the heck is so important that you must hold up traffic?” What has become of good old-fashioned driving etiquette anyway? Does it still even exist?
Well as a matter of fact, it is not only rude, but now new studies actually reveal that talking on a cell phone, while driving, actually slows drivers down by an average of 2 miles an hour. Now that may not sound very significant, but if you are one of the many who commute an hour a day, that number adds almost 20 hours per year to your commute. That’s a lot of extra driving time that we could all do without! University of Utah Professor of Psychology and study author, David Strayer, says that these people are just not going with the flow of traffic because they are distracted, and distracted drivers tend to drive slower and have delayed reaction times. ”It’s simply a matter of brain overload.Your frontal cortex can handle only so many tasks at one time, so you slow down,” Strayer said. The study also concluded that, overall, cell phone drivers took about 3 percent longer to drive the same highly traffic-clogged route (and about 2 percent longer to drive a medium congested route) than people who were not on the phone. So, with one in every ten people in traffic talking on their cell phones, what’s a Gorilla to do?
There you have it folks! That was just what you needed to hear to validate how frustrated you already are about this problem! Now if only we could get people to stop slowing down every time they see a Gorilla driving by them! Be safe, and hey, drive courteously folks! The phone call really can wait until you are out of traffic now can’t it?
January 7th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
See my last comment under “Shocking but Practical.”