I find these articles really interesting just because it could happen to anyone! I mean people who have a car most likely have a cellphone. I just think that people dont' take it as seriously (including myself) I'm changing my habits! haha Drivers everywhere everyday are multitasking while driving. They read mail, eat lunch, put on makeup, and talk on the phone. At the same time, car crashes result in property damage and injuries across the country. What causes all these crashes? Could the distractions of activities unrelated to driving have something to do with it? That is what researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) are working to find out from their 100-car naturalistic driving study. With vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death in the United States for people between 1 and 65 years old, high-quality transportation research is essential to public safety. Researchers are working to provide information that would help prevent the more than 40,000 deaths and 2 million injuries, and the $150 billion cost of crashes each year.
Until recently, research has been confined to analysis of police-reported crash data and studies conducted on test tracks and in simulators. While these methods can be effective, there is no substitute for collecting data in a real-world, or naturalistic, environment.
So, for a year, researchers at VTTI observed the actual daily driving habits of 241 drivers. It was the first instrumented vehicle study undertaken with the primary purpose of collecting large-scale naturalistic driving data.
“Due to the unpredictability of driver performance and the random nature of automobile crashes, the collection of naturalistic data gives a more accurate perspective of why crashes occur,” says Tom Dingus, director of VTTI and program manager for the study.
Original Article
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