Why for the most part are people so distracted when it comes to driving?

Because 99.9% of the time it is mindless and thoughtless work, just going with the flow of traffic, little to stimulate the mind.

So people listen to the radio, they check the phone, they read a book, they eat a hamburger or a taco.

My first accident when I was 19 I was a distracted driver, using the cigarette lighter to light a smoke. Looked up and the pick up in front of me had stopped. Bam.

Driving became too easy, collective comfort ensued, hence taking your eye off the ball.
As my grandma used to say, “you cannot see the wood for the trees”

Automobiles have become much safer and very comfortable. Drivers often have false notions of invulnerability.

I had manual transmissions for most of my life, which made me focus closely on the road and my surroundings. I bought a Toyota Prius last year; no more stick shift. Now, I find that it’s much easier to get distracted, and that I need to make more of an effort.

So what would it take to get people to start paying better attention to their driving?
Going back to manual transmissions?
Some kind of cell phone blocker that won’t allow cell phones to work at anything over 20mph?
In your opinion what is it going to take to get people to start paying attention to their driving?
$$Fines $$ don’t seem to work very well, neither do laws.
More comfortable? meaning so easy to drive that they are just boring? I have an air bag so if I am in a accident I most likely won’t get hurt?

How many ways can one person come up with to beat the same drum?

Hmm.. that’s a tough one. Common sense is so not common after all. By doing all these things you’re putting your life in danger as well as those driving ahead / behind you. Is that so difficult to comprehend? Still people forget this simple thing and drive so casually.

Make all traffic made out of a durable rubber compound, won’t stop accidents but they’ll be hilarious.

People have become so self centered that anything beyond 10 feet is irrelevant, so long as the person in question is still heading in the direction they wish. Like driving a car, it is one thing to know how to drive (driver’s education) it is another to know how to drive defensively (anticipating potentially dangerous hazards/situations). In living life in general, one should live life defensively, always anticipating trouble from any and all directions.
‘Bad stuff always happens to the other guy, not me.’
‘Murphy’s Law? What’s that?’
I am continuously amazed that so many people who get into really bad accidents (ejections especially!) aren’t wearing their seat belts.

Hey @Darth_Algar instead of bitching like usual what do you think it would take to get people to start paying attention?
Or do you just want to pay attention to people that ask even close to the same type question and bitch about them instead?
Personally I would really like to know why people are so distracted about driving these days, and yes that includes some transport drivers as well, before you bring up that bitch as well.
With your love for technology you must have some sort of an answer.

In North Ameriva most people drive automatic cars. This means they can drive with one hand 90% of the time. Because of this, they often use their other hand to eat, drink, talk on the phone, and other. Most people doing this things have control of the wheel not with their dominant hand.

Add in places like when I lived in the Clearwater Beach area of Fliorida. Flipping traffic lights were set for 4 minute cycles at major intersections! It’s infuriating and stupid. Getting caught by the yellow and having to wait 4 minutes you start to do other things while you wait.

Also, people have too much to do. Life is too hectic. People constantly try to do three things at once.

Lastly, most people don’t think they will be the one in a devastating accident.

@JLeslie When we got caught at one of those long traffic light intersections in Florida, my husband would joke, “Did we bring the sandwiches?”

I agree with the posters above that our comfortable little metal boxes on wheels have possibly become too comfortable.

But I also think nearly 30% of us could be over-caffeinated. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Cuban coffee, but I also know what too much can do to me. Caffeine in amounts less than 500mg per day greatly increase one’s powers of concentration. More than that, erratic behavior and mental state, agitation, insomnia and symptoms much like severe, inattentive ADD ensue.

Our coffee, for instance, contains much more caffeine per ounce than the dishwater we used to drink. Also, the average “cup” of coffee has grown from a 4oz cup (an actual “½ cup” by English measure) to an average cup of 9oz’s. In 1980, the average American coffee drinker consumed 1.6 ounces of dishwater coffee at about 50mg of caffeine per ounce and today the average is 3.6×9oz cups of jet fuel. So, statistics that list average cup consumption are misleading in respect to average consumption of caffeine.

This does not include the various stimulants, including caffeine, found in energy drinks, the proliferation of which didn’t exist only 25 years ago—a ten billion dollar market in 2015.

Also, Americans—and probably everybody else in the developed world to some extent—get less sleep. This is now considered a Public Health Problem by the CDC. And 40% of Americans suffer from sleep deprivation. Up to 6.5% of Americans polled in 2012 admitted to momentarily falling asleep at the wheel.

Further Reading

Working Americans are also working an hour and a half more than a decade ago.. Remember, this is an averaage. Many are working less, but many are working much, much more. It’s been a trend for quite awhile. They are working an average of 6.2 more hours per week more than in 1970 earning less spending power per hour,

Our insomnia is attributed to the fact that our lives are much busier, we work more hours, we have the Internet, 24-hour TV and cell phones with us in or near our beds to distract us when we should be sleeping, and stimulant consumption. We are stressed to the max—and most of it is a matter of personal life choices.

So, all alone out there on the road, what I think what you’re dealing with, @SQUEEKY2, is a bunch of tired, agitated, caffeine-induced mentally hyperactive narcoleptics in the perfect environment to either fall asleep, or get extremely bored and grab an electronic device to pass the time.

@SQUEEKY2 “With your love for technology you must have some sort of an answer.”

See, things like this are why your questions hardly seem worth a serious response. You ask a “question” that isn’t a question at all, but rather are you seeking like-minded responses then, when you don’t get the replies you want, you assume that anyone who disagrees with you must be slavishly addicted to the subject of your complaints (because otherwise, there’s simply no way they could possibly disagree with you, right?).

Darth for some of my questions I am going to agree but that has nothing to do with this question and you know it, because I am not asking anyone to agree or disagree what I am asking is why are drivers so distracted these days.
Want to give it a shot or not?

@janbb Pinellas County is ridiculous! Other counties in FL are not like that. When I moved into my house they had just changed that intersection from 4 minutes to 3, because a very large subdivision just a ¼ mile north of us had a lot of accidents trying to get out into the main road. They really deserved a light, but anyway, the county decided stopping traffic going north more often would create more breaks in the traffic for people to be able to merge into traffic without waiting forever. I was so glad they had figured that out by the time I was moving in.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why any intersections stop traffic so long. I can’t see one good reason.

^^Pinellas County has the highest population density in all the 40-something counties in Florida. Hard to believe with Miami (Dade) and Orlando (Orange) out there, but it’s true. The traffic is quite bad, especially during rush hour. But you should see it during a hurricane evacuation. There are only four ways out for one million people. Three of them shut down at winds from 40mph (Sunshine Skyway Bridge), 60mph (Howard Frankenstein Bridge and Courtney Campbell Causeway), and Hwy 19 is usually under water within hours of outer band arrival. Now that’s a traffic jam.

^^It is true, but that still does not explain the traffic lights. Dade and Broward are extremely densely populated in some areas of the county and their intersections are not like that. The traffic in Dade can be horrific though, so I’m not sure I should use it as a gleaming example.

I felt vindicated when I heard the intersection near my house was changed to decrease accidents. A bunch of accidents had to happen for them to figure out what seems obvious to me.

@JLeslie I’m going to make a rather cruel blanket statement about Pinellas County, but I believe it to be true for the most part. I grew up there. Traditionally, it has been run by die-hard, conservative Republicans—or yellow dog Democrats, which are the same thing—and supported mainly by grumpy old farts from up north and more recently a younger conservative type neither of whom want to pay their taxes or have ever had a strong feeling of community. They get what the pay for. One of the things they get is poor traffic engineering.

They don’t have jughandles so they have to have a turn for each direction to turn left before the straight on traffic can go. It’s all those turning lanes that slows the intersections down.

19 is a pain in the butt.

@janbb I disagree. All over the US the left turning lanes go first, then the straights, then the left turning lanes of the perpendicular road, and then the straights. The majority of the road systems across the country do that. In Pinellas they just let the straights go green for a really long time, which means they are red a really long time too.

@Espiritus_Corvus My biggest gripe with Pinellas is how they build the houses too low. Even newer houses. The joint floods all too often, and the regs for construction should require each house to be elevated another 3 inches from whatever they are doing now in my opinion. They don’t check the floor elevation of the house when being constructed until the house is built right before giving the CO. If the builder didn’t meet the engineering requirement, well oops, but they aren’t going to make the builder tear it down. Incompetence. I learned all this the hard way. If the builder screwed it up, I don’t think they need to disclose it to a buyer.

I’m not sure what being a Republican has to do with traffic lights.

It has everything to do Republicans—with taxation and how the money is spent. Republicans in Pinellas are against any increase in taxes even though the population increases creating a higher demand for services.

@Espiritus_Corvus those people at the top must have lived in Pinellas or Hillsborough their whole lives and never have driven anywhere else to not be cable to figure out how there is actually a better way. I used to say that annoys me about Memphis metro area when it came to building permits and urban planning.

I’m not sure if the person in charge of traffic lights in Pinellas is a republican? The county has voted for the democrat in most of the presidential elections in the last 30 years, although it’s been a close vote if I remember correctly. I once looked it up because someone was talking about “Tampa” being full of Republicans, and I didn’t have a feeling it was strongly lopsided towards the Republicans based on the people I knew.

Pinellas does have some very nice perks. The public pool and rec centers are quite nice. Not every county around FL has such a thing. I have no idea how good or convenient the bus system is, but at least there is one.

@JLeslie Nope. Poor assumptions on your part. Florida isn’t like other places in the nation. Pinellas’ “People at the Top”, with few exceptions weren’t born here or come from old, established families. The only one I can think of is Bilirakis, from a Greek family that arrived in Tarpon Springs about 1905. The rest of the “old timers” arrived during and after the WWII boom and were here to basically economically exploit the area.

They don’t give a shit about community or the highly sensitive Florida economy or public infrastructure beyond what is absolutely necessary to prevent chaos. I cite how they’ve paved over paradise, but left out any reasonable facsimile of mass transit to take the load off their hap-hazard, badly engineered road system. Even for pedestrian-friendly environments, you have to go to downtown Clearwater, which is compliments of Scientology and not the county or city government, or downtown St. Pete which is mainly due to private investment and haphazard at best. And as those businesses leave or change hands, the improvements are deteriorating.

Pinellas does have a bus system, but it goes nowhere practical because there are few central work places or town centers—the result of poorly planned, unregulated post-WWII suburban sprawl. As a result, it is bleeding tax money and is not a favored target of further tax investment. See how this shit always comes back to bite one in the ass?

This Republican leadership, which is nearly top-down from Tallahassee to the Pinellas School Board, has never given a shit about anything outside thier own private homes or businesses.

When I go to places like Key West or Monterrey I see people who are proud of their communities and are willing to make the pubic investment to increase convenience for everybody. These weren’t always beautiful little garden spots. From 1930 to about 1965, Monterrey was an over-fished stinking shithole of closed canneries a dangerous waterfront and was even later abandoned by the Armed Services after WWII. By 1965, they had the insane idea of beautifying in order to attract investment. It worked. In 1969 they had another insane idea—put all their power lines underground. I think they were one of the first cities to do so. Today people go to Monterrey just to be in Monterrey just as they do Key West which has a much similar 20th century history.

@JLeslie I find it hard to believe you spent time here, had a business and built a house (and found out the hard way what lack of consumer protection there is on big ticket items—the contractor is a better source of tax revenue and therefore gets the protection). You lived in Pinellas and didn’t wonder why a place that smells so much like money has the infrastructure and regulation bordering on a third-word country, as well as the unemployment and homeles of one as well? Where else in the US are 40%+ of the homeless employed full time? I venture to guess not very many places..

How can you be that clueless?

Guys like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia or the originators of Jabil, or many others, come here sometimes and start a business. Then, when they realize they can afford better places with better schools, better aesthetics, more friendly infrastructure thus more comfortable living—even at greater tax expense—they take their businesses and GO.

I watched a paradise wantonly destroyed from 1964 onward—just as described by Joni Mitchell (Canadian) and Jimmy Buffet (Texan) in song. The people who destroyed it and continue to milk it for every last drop are not in the least in your traffic jams or even if Pinellas has a decent evacuation plan. Most of them probably no longer even live here. Why should they? They now can afford much better.

End of Rant

^^Of course I know they have been outside of Pinellas county. Secondly, I had built 3 houses in other parts of FL before that house that almost gave me a heart attack in Pinellas. At least when I went to the county engineer he did do something to force my builder to correct my situation. The laws just don’t help to prevent the situation up front.

Pinellas had good things and bad things about it.

Florida, the state, I found out, about 4 years ago, passed a law that really protects builders from everything. It’s overprotective and allows them to be incompetent.

Outside of that is the traffic lights. I fairly simple thing that when pushed they fixed it at that one intersection. They obviously know that is the better way, I think more people need to complain.

They think nothing will happen to them.

What I love is when people cuss other people out for doing stupid stuff, then they turn around a do the exact same stupid stuff. But it’s OK when they do it. There is always a good reason, you see.