Tag Archives: emergency preparedness

Safe Driving Tips, Teens

Just In Case: Don’t Forget ICE

No one plans to be in a car crash, but they happen.  On average, more than 8,000 people are injured in car accidents every day.

If you’re hurt in a car crash, you may not be conscious, or you may not be coherent.  Emergency personnel and first responders need to know how to contact your family if something has happened to you.  The easiest way for them to do this is with your own cell phone.

You can make it easy for police and EMTs to contact your family by adding ICE contacts to your cell phone.  ICE stands for “In Case of Emergency” – they’re trained to look for these alphabetically in your address book.

Create a new contact that looks like this:

ICE Mom 215-555-1212

Begin the entry with “ICE” and follow it with some descriptive context for who the person is to you – mom, dad, uncle, husband, wife, etc.  Add more than one ICE contact if needed.

Highway Safety, Safe Driving Tips

Watch Those Snowplows

Drive Safely Around Snowplows

We’ve had our first snowstorm of 2012, but winter is far from over.  Each year, many drivers and passengers are injured in collisions with snowplows.  To reduce your risks, follow these basic tips:

  • Use caution when approaching, following or passing a snowplow.  They sometimes need to take evasive action to avoid stranded cars or roadside obstacles.
  • When traveling behind a snowplow, allow a longer follow distance.  Snowplows travel below the posted speed limit and may stop suddenly.
  • Don’t brake suddenly in front of a snowplow.  Like other trucks, they have a long stopping distance, and road conditions warranting a plow truck only make that worse.
  • Don’t crowd a snowplow.  Besides erratic manuevers and sudden stops, plows are also usually spreading anti-ice materials out the back.  Keep your car a safe distance away – 200 feet should be plenty.
  • Don’t travel next to a snowplow.  Remember, they may need to shift left suddenly to avoid roadside obstacles.
  • Check carefully before passing a snowplow.  Figure out to which side it’s discharging the snow to avoid getting coated in debris and losing visibility.  Remember, plows are generally larger than your car, and you may not be able to see all parts of the truck clearly.
Automotive Technology

Cars That Drive Themselves

The February 2012 issue of Wired Magazine features a cover story about cars that drive themselves.  No longer a technology of the future, these cars are actually here already, navigating themselves through busy rush hour freeway traffic at 70 miles per hour.  And they’re doing it more safely than the human beings around them.

Google's Self-Driving Car

These cars utilize everything from radar to laser arrays to identify and track targets around them, and they can make 20 threat assessments every second.  Recently, I had a high school class take a hazard perception challenge in which I showed them a slide for four seconds and then asked them three questions about what they saw.  Whines and grumbles flared up with the first question, as students complained that that wasn’t enough time.  I then showed them several video clips in which unrecognized threats turned into crashes in less than two seconds – the idea being to reinforce how every second counts when driving for survival.

But, 20 threat assessments each second?  If there’s a human mind capable of matching that, I’ve never been in its company.

I’m one of those people who loves to drive.  I prefer a standard transmission to an automatic and would rather be on a curvy mountain road alone than on a crowded freeway.  But I’m keenly aware most people don’t share my passion for it.  Most people use their car simply to get them from one place to another as quickly as possible.  For them, automatic transmissions, power steering, ABS, electronic stability control and even automated parallel parking are welcome conveniences, elements of the driving task they are happy to hand over to computer control.

Nevada has become the first state to pass laws concerning self-driving cars – they’re exempt from anti-texting laws, for one.  As the Wired author puts it, “Maybe the problem is not that texting and Facebook are distracting us from driving. Maybe the problem is that driving distracts us from our digital lives.”

Read the full WIRED article online here.

What would you prefer?

Would you rather sign off from your digital world for an hour at a time and tackle the physical and cognitive tasks required to drive safely, or would you prefer to select your destination and let the car handle getting you there while you multitask through your commute?