Drivers today easily distracted

I have been reading in the Herald about school bus accidents and most are with buses being rear-ended when stopped. Now I ask you, how in the world does a driver run into a stopped school bus? It’s painted yellow with flashing lights and is as big as a house.

It seems drivers nowadays do not pay enough attention to their driving and are easily distracted by so many other things.

Back in what I like to call the “good ol’ days” when you actually had to “drive” your car, accidents like that simply didn’t happen. In those days cars did not have power brakes, power steering, automatic transmission, and not even air conditioning. You really had to concentrate on what you were doing.

These days we don’t even have a key to unlock the doors or start the engine. We slip into our comfy bucket seats that are cooled or heated and adjustable to 10 different positions. We adjust our steering wheel to suit our comfort. Slide that shift lever into “drive” and away we go.

We don’t really have to pay much attention to the car as it’s so much smarter than we are. It will tell us exactly how to get to a destination we aren’t familiar with and on the highway we push another few buttons and the car will automatically maintain the speed we set it for.

So, why not just sit back and enjoy the ride? Perhaps do a bit of texting or make a phone call to someone we haven’t seen or heard from in the past 10 minutes.

Cars are supposed to have made us safer today than ever before, but have they? Now drivers no longer think they have to concentrate on driving so they don’t.

This story was originally published February 26, 2017 at 4:16 PM with the headline "Drivers today easily distracted."