There is not enough talk about responsible driving. Despite the fact that zero tolerance was introduced ten years ago there are still many accidents that are caused by inattentive or slow drivers who drank alcohol before they got behind the wheel. After drinking booze driving is only recommended when the amount of consumed spirits the night before did not exceed 50 ml and the alcohol had enough time to break down in our body. Due to the effects of alcohol our reaction time increases significantly and our sense of responsibility decreases, and as a result the risk of accidents gets much higher.
In addition there are other threats that we, drivers must face. For example the risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. On average fatigue breaks upon us every 90 minutes when we fall asleep or we overcome the urge and stay awake. In this case during driving it’s worth taking a 15-20 minutes break. Other threats are phone calls and text messages. If we hear the beeping sound we automatically reach for the phone, read the text and type the answer. It could be really risky to take our eyes off the road because we cannot share our attention. A Belgian foundation proved it a few years ago in a brave campaign. During the campaign they introduced a new traffic role for the drivers sitting next to the teacher, practicing at the routine field: they had to write a message and drive at the same time. Nobody could do both without a great braking or hitting the beacon. (The summary video of the campaign can be viewed under the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbjSWDwJILs)
In the view of this information we recommend waiting until the alcohol is totally broken down in our body after we drank alcohol. If we feel too tired we should not sit behind the wheel. However, if we can’t avoid it we have to drive carefully and in case of a long way take a break regularly. We should not use our phone in hand during driving and accept emergency phone calls hands-free.
We will continue our blog with the 2. part about driving responsibly soon.
Budget Journal 