Drinking and Driving: a Serious and Deadly Crime

Drinking and Driving: a Serious and Deadly Crime

The driver’s reaction is a set of skills that allow you to timely prevent an emergency and apply the brake.

Driving a car requires special attention from drivers. They must respond in time to all kinds of obstacles, be able to predict emergencies. Sometimes there are only a few seconds to apply the brake, and those seconds can cost someone their life.

What determines the reaction rate

Many factors affect response time. It is not only the brand of the car, the weather conditions on the street that matters, but also the individual characteristics of the organism.

What is the average driver’s reaction time and what does it depend on:

  • The gender of the person. It is scientifically proven that men react to potential danger faster than women. Their reaction time is on average at 1,8 s. While for ladies, the speed of reaction to danger is 2,8 s.
  • Age. Motorists under the age of thirty react faster to impending danger. Young drivers react to a potential accident in 1,54 seconds. The reaction time in the elderly increases to 2,05 s.
  • Driving experience. People who have driven a vehicle for more than 5 years can react faster to impending danger than those who have recently driven.

Additional factors:

  • time of day at which movement is carrying out;
  • weather;
  • the speed at which the car is moving;
  • the quality of the road surface;
  • the level of illumination of the road at night;
  • the general well-being of the driver while driving.

Also, the speed of response to probable accidents depends on the physical fitness of the person driving.

What happens when you drink alcohol?

To find out how alcohol affects the driver’s reaction, it is necessary to understand the mechanism of the effect of alcohol on the human body as a whole.

Alcoholic drinks are basing on ethanol. They have a calming and inhibitory effect. Therefore, a drunk driver is a potential killer. Such people can harm not only themselves but also other motorists who drive without breaking the rules.

When drinking alcohol, the speed of reaction to a potential danger decreases, the criticality of assessing a difficult transport situation is distorting. All this leads to road traffic accidents, which can turn into dire consequences.

Also, alcohol itself negatively affects the work of the heart, brain, blood vessels.

Drinking and driving: understanding the risks

It is strictly forbidden to drive while drunk, even if you have drinking very little.

How alcohol affects the driver’s reaction time:

  1. Small doses of alcohol also negatively affect the nervous system, as a result – the reaction is inhibiting.
  2. Ethanol enters the brain, which leads to a deterioration in the activity of the nervous system. An untrained driver may face attacks of headaches, increased pressure, chest discomfort while driving, which is likely to provoke an accident.

How alcohol influences driver reaction time

When drunk, the ability to quickly respond to danger and make timely decisions in difficult situations on the road is lost.

At the same time, many drivers, having drunk alcohol, overestimate their abilities and believe that they can prevent an accident, almost completely losing their vigilance.

In fact, it turns out that their reaction is slow, although the motorists themselves do not think so at the time of movement.

Experts believe that a drunk person is much more dangerous than an elderly or sick person. After all, older people control their actions, are in a sane state, and do not overestimate their abilities. Rather, on the contrary, they have excessive vigilance.

But alcohol and a quick reaction to a difficult road situation are practically incompatible things.

Often, drunk drivers want to throw out their energy and feel the excitement due to a surge of adrenaline:

  • they begin to drive at high-speed
  • drunk drivers try to repeat any tricks that they would never do in a sober mind
  • they try to overtake passing cars, periodically driving into the oncoming lane.

All this creates potential conditions for road accidents and the death of innocent people.

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