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I'm Deborah, survivor of everything from multiple cancer battles to major business setbacks. Join my search for ways to move the mountains, big & small, that block your path to success.
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A life-saving cutback

Side View of a Speeding Car

Did you know every hour you spend driving knocks 20 minutes off your life expectancy because of the increased risk of being involved in a fatal collision?

Neither did I.

Before the price of gasoline went sky high, I used to drive around just for the heck of it. Stress release. Sometimes I’d drive for a couple of hours. Taken in context with that statistic, now it sounds like I was ingesting slow poison.

Yikes.

“The 20-minute penalty for each hour spent driving … is completely invisible to most drivers. But it is there lurking in the background, and at the end of the year, it adds up to about 45,000 deaths [in North America],” says Dr. Donald Redelmeier, a physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. Redelmeier has been studying the issue along with Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi.

So now that I’m aware of the statistic, am I going to stop driving? Well … no. And neither are you. But, the researchers say, there is something all drivers can do to improve our life expectancy: Slow down.

The conclusions of Redelmeier and Bayoumi’s study, published in the Journal of Medical Decision Making, were based on computerized traffic modeling and statistics as well as laws of physics. Many other factors also were taken into account. According to their research, slowing down about 2 mph (3 kph) would cost about three minutes in drive time each day but add about three hours a year to our overall life expectancy. How? By resulting in 3 million fewer crashes causing property damage, 1 million fewer crashes causing injury, and 9,000 fewer deaths. That’s a 20 percent reduction in North American traffic deaths each year from a 2 mph reduction in speed.

Considering the cost vs. benefit … think I’ll slow down.


 

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