You know that drivers in other cars traveling on the road alongside you are dangerous when they are involved with other activities while driving.   Still, do you find yourself doing many of those same activities:  texting, eating, conversing on the phone, switching CDs, searching for change at a toll booth?

Despite how good you may consider your multitasking skills, reality is that you CANNOT multitask.  It is physically impossible.  Instead of actually accomplishing more by doing multiple activities simultaneously, your brain is switching back and forth, which takes longer, and you are not producing 100 percent for either task.  It is bad enough when you are in the office and hindering productivity, but on the road there is also a physical danger.

Allstate Insurance and the Houston Independent School District conducted a program for students who drive.  First they drove through a distraction-free course and then repeated that with various concentration-diverting activities, including texting, hunting for change, manually scanning for a radio station, and traveling with an annoyingly loud passenger.

Students left with a renewed awareness of what happens when they divert their attention.  That obstacle course provided first-hand proof of the dangers of multitasking. 

• Car crashes are the main cause of accidental death among teens, killing 5000 per year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
• Texting while driving (all ages) elevated the risk of a crash or near crash to 23 times the rate of a distraction-free driver, according to a recent Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

Every parent should take the time with their driving-age children to reproduce this experience in a safe parking lot.  Then switch places with your teen and try the same thing yourself.

Want further demonstration?  There is a graphic four-minute YouTube video segment, used as a British public service announcement, showing the effects of texting while driving.