The Minnesota State Patrol's recent crackdown on distracted drivers turned up some doozys of excuses: "playing the game Last Frontier while driving. Said can't find time to play at work," "Cigarette in one hand, phone in the other. No hands on wheel," "steering w/knee doing long-hand math on piece of paper in MPLS on 35W. Also not buckled." (Read some more of the MSP's Twitter campaign here)
Here at UMD, a PlayStation and a video game were transformed into a simulator to see how well drivers do driving and responding to texts. Dr. Edward Downs, a professor in UMD’s Department of Communication, has studied the effects of distracted driving, so he was perhaps the only person not surprised by what the people who tried the simulator discovered.
