So as my title states, the week I am writing about took place over the Thanksgiving holiday. This was such an awesome week as my family came to Orlando (along with a thousand other families) to celebrate. I live about ten to fifteen minutes away from Disney so you can only imagine how many tourists are in this area during the holiday season which makes it all the more important for me to not get distracted while driving. Many people driving around my area are looking at the GPS, making wrong turns or getting lost, or trying to deal with a car full of family. My parents tell me every day to make sure I am watching out for other people as much as I am paying attention to the road because there are a lot of people who don’t know where they are going and if I get distracted for a single second it could be a huge mistake.
So far through out my safe driving journey, I believe I have improved quite a bit. I have stopped checking my text messages and I have also stopped eating food on my way to my destinations. I still really need to focus on not changing music while driving but it is getting better. I have started to put songs in my queue before I start to drive off but I still tend to treat my car like a concert stage. And my dad has told me this so many times, when I am driving, I am not on a concert stage or singing in the shower. I don’t need to be changing music, dancing, blasting my radio as loud as it can go, or even screaming the songs at the top of my lungs. I am driving a car and that needs to be my main focus. Here’s a gif of what I definitely should NOT be doing…
As happy as I am that I am doing this scholarship to learn what I can do to better my driving, I wish the people around me would try to work on theirs as well. On Thanksgiving day, I had a friend call me who was very upset. My friend had spent the whole day drinking and watching football with his family at a friends house which happened to be an hour away from where we live. My friend called me from his car crying because he had gotten into a big fight with his dad and he just wanted to go home. At first I was furious that he was even in his car after he had been drinking. Then I realized that I couldn’t sit here and be mad at him because he stopped and made a choice to call me before he started driving.
I sat on the phone with him for at least an hour trying to talk to him about how everything was going to be okay as long as he didn’t press the gas and start driving away. Someone could have gotten seriously injured or even killed and I am just so thankful that he called me before he did anything. Doing all of this research for the safe driving scholarship has really helped me understand how important it is to just simply focus on the road. People make it so easy to get distracted and with a blink of an eye make the wrong decision.
What can you do to prevent distracted driving?
Here is a video that will go through a few tips to help you figure out what you can do to improve your driving.
A few states are making huge strides in the fight against texting and driving by banning the use of cells phones all together. I know that my hometown state Georgia has banned the use of cell phones all together. If you want to talk to someone on the phone, it has to be through blue tooth. Your phone can not be in your hand, lap, seat, pocket. It must be away from you at all times. If you want to use your phone for GPS, it must be mounted on a vent or on the dashboard/ windshield. I really like this law and wish that more states would follow this example. In Florida, the state I am attending college in, does not have one of these laws and it is quite frustrating to constantly see people driving while using their phones.
So here is my weeks recap for Thanksgiving week:
What I improved:
Took my schools shuttle from one campus to the other to limit my driving for that day which helps prevent me from getting into my own accident.
Taking a minute before I started driving to queue my music so I did not do it while I was driving.
Sharing information with friends about distracted driving and to not drink and drive.
Did not eat my french fries on the way home from chick-fil-a for the third time in a row!
What I could still improve on:
Not singing and dancing in the car while I am driving.
Spread the word even more on how to prevent distracted driving.
Stop holding my phone while I am using my GPS.
Well this concludes my third week on my journey to safe driving. I hope you are enjoying my blog post and I hope I was able to make an impact on your thoughts when it comes to distracted driving. Here is a link to the GJEL scholarship as well as their facebook page! https://www.gjel.com/scholarship https://www.facebook.com/GJELAttorneys/
Jordan's Journey to Safe Driving 