Simple Tips for Safer Trips

Miscellaneous Vehicle Equipment
Brakes, lights, windshield wipers and so forth are your responsibility. Windshield wipers, for example, go largely ignored until the second day of the first rainstorm of the season, but about two years is all you can reasonably expect them to last. In fact, they deteriorate enormously in the hot summer months when they're not being used but are being given a daily cooking.

Things About the Driver
Pay attention to what you are doing behind the wheel. If everyone paid proper attention to his and/or her driving, traffic crashes would be virtually eliminated. Here's one simple little rule: Never do anything that causes anyone else to have to make an allowance for you—because they may not make that allowance. If you cut in front of someone, expecting that person to slow down and let you in, and that other person doesn't—for whatever reason; maybe he's on the cell phone, maybe she's fiddling with the radio—then you're both going to have a problem. It's not that person's fault for not making the necessary allowance for your bad driving. It's your fault for having the unreasonable expectation that they will.

Seatbelts
A few years ago a well-known manufacturer of sport-utility vehicles and a well-known manufacturer of tires were embroiled in a well-known mess regarding tires blowing out, sport-utility vehicles rolling over and people being injured or killed. Let's look at a less well-known aspect of that entire tragedy:


In at least 80 percent of those cases where people were killed, they weren't wearing their seatbelts. Got that?

Rolling Over
Many people believe the primary cause of rollover crashes is the relatively higher centers of gravity of such vehicles as sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks. It's just not so.


About 95 percent of all rollovers happen because the vehicle is "tripped," which means it went off the pavement and hit something—such as a curb—that caused the vehicle to "trip" and roll over. This has nothing at all to do with a high center of gravity and everything to do with keeping the vehicle on the pavement.