If you’ve ever had the poor luck of getting into a car accident, then you know how devastating they can be.
Car accidents are costly and disrupting to your life, especially if they cause an injury. With so many crashes happening every day, you need to do whatever you can to reduce your potential of getting into one.
According to Dolman Law Group, to do this, you’ll need to avoid unsafe driving behaviors like reckless driving. While it might not be intentional, reckless driving is a constant concern for other drivers because they don’t know how to react to what you’re doing.
Driving recklessly directly increases your chances of getting into an accident, so it’s important to limit any of this type of driving behavior. We’ll give you an idea of what reckless driving looks like below so that you can avoid doing it during your daily driving!
Aggression
Any form of aggression classifies as reckless driving.
This can include a wide variety of behaviors like excessive honking, tailgating, brake-checking, making obscene gestures, refusing to let a driver over, throwing objects, and trying to run someone off the road.
Aggressive driving is reckless because it’s inherently dangerous. There’s nothing safe about tailgating or brake-checking because all it takes is one small mistake to cause an accident.
The other problem with aggression is that it can cause tension with another driver. If you have two drivers that both begin to drive aggressively, then a crash is almost unavoidable.
The opposite of aggressive driving is defensive driving, which prioritizes safety and avoiding crashes. With this in mind, driving aggressively can’t possibly be anything other than reckless.
Regardless of what another driver does and even if they’re entirely wrong, don’t start being aggressive as it will escalate the situation.
Neglecting Precautions
Reckless driving also includes neglecting required precautions.
In other words, a reckless driver is someone who doesn’t take the necessary actions to ensure the safety of themselves and other drivers.
This can include fairly basic mistakes like failing to yield, cutting another driver off, neglecting to use turn signals, and ignoring stop signs. While these are easy errors to make, they are reckless because they create a good scenario for an accident to happen.
For example, if you cut another driver off on the freeway and then need to brake shortly after, they might rear-end you if they aren’t paying close attention or react slowly.
The problem with neglecting precautions is that you aren’t indicating what you’re doing to other drivers. Communication is critical for driving because misunderstanding a situation on the road has serious consequences.
Willingly neglecting necessary safety precautions is downright reckless as you are refusing to take steps to ensure your safety. Even if you don’t mean to, failing to communicate with other drivers is dangerous.
Simple tasks like activating a turn signal and waiting for an ample opening might seem pointless, but not doing them is reckless and they directly contribute toward improving road safety for all.
Unnecessary Risk-Taking
Another aspect of reckless driving is unnecessary risk-taking.
Risk-taking includes things like speeding, running red lights, and ignoring your blindspots. The common theme here is that none of these behaviors are essential for driving, nor do they contribute to making you a better driver.
Speeding reduces the amount of time you have to react to situations and increases your braking distance. This is surely reckless because you’re increasing the risk of an accident for no reason other than wanting to drive faster.
Some risk is inherent within driving. For example, there’s always risk involved with merging or yielding situations. Another driver might make a mistake or force their way and cause an accident.
With this in mind, it’s important to limit the amount of risks that are taken while driving. Actions like speeding and running red lights are reckless, serve no purpose, and can also reward you with a ticket.
Impairment
Driving while impaired is another reckless behavior to avoid.
The common association with impairment is alcohol, but this can also apply to drug use and fatigue. All of these will affect your mind and body, impairing your ability to think clearly and drive well.
You surely know that something like drinking and driving is incredibly dangerous, but you might overlook fatigued driving. All drivers are a little tired in the morning, but they still need to get to work.
Nonetheless, limiting fatigued driving is important to ensure your safety. This applies to any type of impairment to ensure that you can quickly identify and react to situations while driving.
Willingly driving while impaired is reckless because you’re knowingly driving in a weakened state. Even if you think that you’re capable, you can’t be as skilled as you are when you are sober and rested.
Always look for alternative methods of transportation to eliminate any temptations for impaired driving that you might have.
Distraction
Finally, driving distracted is also reckless.
Driving is something that you do every day and going along the same commute can get boring. Bored drivers are easily enticed by distractions and there’s nothing more distracting than a smartphone.
Between texts and notifications, there’s plenty that a driver might want to check out. If you’re familiar with the route that you’re taking, then you might not think twice about taking a glance at your phone.
Doing this is a big mistake and highly reckless. This is because it diverts your attention from driving and also takes your eyes away from the road. When this is happening, you can’t adequately assess traffic and anticipate dangerous situations.
While smartphones are certainly distracting, distraction can also be caused by passengers, looking for something in the back seat, reaching down to pick something up, applying makeup, eating, and using a GPS.
Any form of distractions should be minimized and you need to be watching the road at all times to limit reckless driving!
Closing Thoughts
Car accidents are caused by many different reasons, one of those being reckless driving. This entails several different behaviors that are dangerous and make an accident more likely.
To be a better driver, you want to limit driving recklessly. Reckless driving behavior includes aggression, neglecting safety precautions, unnecessary risk-taking, impairment, and distraction.
Other drivers don’t know how to respond to a reckless driver. This makes reckless driving unsafe and a great reason to avoid doing it. If you want to be a better driver, then you need to limit any reckless behavior.
No matter how safe you are behind the wheel, it’s impossible to control the choices others make on the road. If you become injured in a car accident due to reckless driving, it’s imperative to ask for help. Reach out the experienced personal injury lawyers at Joye Law Firm to get the support you deserve.
