Keep Your (Braking) Distance: More Than Just Slowing Down
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Keep Your (Braking) Distance: More Than Just Slowing Down
Keep Your (Braking) Distance: More Than Just Slowing Down article on Edmunds.com
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Last Sunday my 77.6 year old wife and I went to see a movie and she was driving West on a 2 lane road about 35 mph, traveling 51' per second, staying about 100' behind the car in front. On the way, a car darted out from a strip shopping center on our left and turned West in front of us. My wife hit the brakes in about 1/10 of a second and avoided a collision.
On the way back home driving East at 35 MPH about 1/2 block from the near miss going West, a car darted out of a side street on our right starting about 25' in front of us. My wife again hit the brakes in about 1/10 of a second and missed hitting their car by a matter of inches.
According to your Perception Time and Reaction Time, we would have had a collision both times. And on the last one she would not have gotten her foot on the brake pedal in 1 1/2 seconds before a crash.
Perception and Reaction can be trained to be as fast as my wife's action that prevented 2 collisions. I taught my wife and my time is slightly faster than her speed and I am 88 years old.
An example of super perception and reaction speed, a few years ago I saw an interview on TV of a man who teaches fast draw and shooting to actors for wild west movies. Two round objects about 3" in diameter were dropped about 50' from him.
He drew his 6 shooter Revolver and shot both of them while they were in the air and you could only hear one shot sound. The Perception Time, draw pistol, and 2 shots Reaction Time only consumed less than one second.
Fast Perception and Fast Reaction should become a requirement for a drivers license.
Jeff Goolsby