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Your Driving,
the
Road, and
Your
Vehicle
Defensive Driving
The best advice anyone can give about driving is: Drive
defensively.
Please start with a very important safety device in your
vehicle: Buckle up. See
Safety Belts: They Are for
Everyone on page
1-9.
Defensive driving really means “be ready for anything.”
On city streets, rural roads or freeways, it means
“always expect the unexpected.”
Assume that pedestrians or other drivers are going to
be careless and make mistakes. Anticipate what
they might do. Be ready for their mistakes.
Rear-end collisions are about the most preventable of
accidents. Yet they are common. Allow enough following
distance. It’s the best defensive driving maneuver, in
both city and rural driving. You never know when
the vehicle in front of you is going to brake or turn
suddenly.
Defensive driving requires that a driver concentrate on
the driving task. Anything that distracts from the
driving task
-
such as concentrating on a cellular
telephone call, reading, or reaching for something on
the floor
-
makes proper defensive driving more difficult
and can even cause a collision, with resulting injury.
Ask a passenger to help do things like this, or pull off the
road in a safe place to do them yourself. These simple
defensive driving techniques could save your life.
Drunken Driving
Death and injury associated with drinking and driving is
a national tragedy. It’s the number one contributor to
the highway death toll, claiming thousands of victims
every year.
Alcohol affects four things that anyone needs to drive a
vehicle:
Judgment
0
Muscular Coordination
Vision
0
Attentiveness.
Police records show that almost half of all motor
vehicle-related deaths involve alcohol. In most cases,
these deaths are the result of someone who was
drinking and driving.
In
recent years, more than
16,000
annual motor vehicle-related deaths have been
associated with the use of alcohol, with more than
300,000
people injured.
4-2
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