Key Tips on Staying Safe When Traveling on Busy Highways

Whether you’re visiting a relative residing in a place that’s very far from your home, embarking on your yearly summer vacation with your family or friends, or simply going to any other destination located in another city or town, you may find yourself driving your vehicle along a highway. But compared to your typical roads, hundreds of vehicles from small cars to huge trucks pass by the nation’s highways every minute. Thus, you want to stay safe whenever you’re traveling on busy highways, especially as you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of a vehicular accident. Here are some key tips on how you can drive your vehicle along a busy highway as safe as possible:

Get enough sleep before putting yourself behind the wheel.

Before visiting a relative who’s living hundreds of miles away from your place, your baby might have cried loudly and woken you up right in the middle of the night. You then lulled your baby to sleep so that he/she would stop crying, but you weren’t able to catch up on your broken sleep pattern anymore, which led you to feel drowsy on the day that you and your kids are supposed to drop by your relative’s house.

If you’ll be getting behind the wheel and you only had less than five hours of sleep, you’re five times as likely to become involved in a vehicular accident.
Whenever possible, you should make sure that you’ve gotten uninterrupted sleep of at least eight hours or more the night before driving along a busy highway so that you won’t fall asleep behind the wheel and crash into another vehicle or some stationary object.

Make sure that your vehicle’s headlights and windshield wipers are working properly before heading out to drive.

The highway where you’re driving along may still be busy even at night as some of your fellow motorists are also driving back home from their respective jobs. You may be encountering sudden rainfall, snowfall, hail storm or fog while you’re coasting along a busy highway.

In any of the situations mentioned above, you would want your vehicle’s headlights and windshield wipers to work so that you can still drive even in less than ideal conditions.
You should always test your vehicle’s headlights and windshield wipers first before driving. If either of them got are not working, you should have them replaced with new ones as soon as possible.

Drive within a highway’s designated minimum and maximum speed limits.

Different highways have different speed limits which can initially leave you confused, especially if you’re a first-time driver.

To make it safe for you and your passengers while you’re all on the road, you would want to drive along some busy highway at an average speed of 50 to 55 miles per hour.
You should slow down though once you approach a traffic jam or suddenly encounter less than ideal weather conditions like the ones mentioned in the previously.
You should also check your vehicle’s speedometer from time to time so that highway patrol cops wouldn’t flag you down, make you pull over on the highway’s shoulder, and charge you with either over speeding or driving under the minimum speed limit.

Always wear a seatbelt.

While it might initially look to you as yet another fancy thing that your vehicle has, its seatbelt is, in fact, its most useful feature.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even stated on their official website that using a seatbelt is one of the most effective ways of saving lives and reducing the number of vehicular accident-related injuries.
Thus, you would want yourself and any passengers you’ve brought along with you to fasten their seatbelts before heading out on some busy highway and regardless of the specifics of a state’s seatbelt laws.

Focus on the road as much as you can and not on something else.

Your relative who you and your kids will be visiting might be calling you on your phone to check if you can make it to their place while you’re driving your way there, or you may want to browse your online map using your phone and check how many more miles there are for you to drive until you reach your summer vacation destination. You may also have turned your vehicle’s radio on and loud so that you won’t fall asleep.

The situations mentioned above are some of the distractions that you may have found yourself doing while you’re driving along a busy highway.
To go back to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official website, they stated there that more than 1,000 people get either injured or killed in vehicular accidents that involved distracted drivers.
If you have to do something other than driving, you should pull over on the highway’s shoulder first before getting back behind the wheel.

According to the Insurance Information Institute, more than 5 to 6 million vehicular accidents occurred between 2006 and 2015. While it would be virtually impossible to bring that statistic down to zero, you can contribute to reducing it by following the above-listed tips so that you and any passengers you’ve brought along with you can reach your destination safe and sound after traveling on some busy highway.

If you’re involved in a car accident regardless if the precautions you’ve implemented, you should know what to do about it especially within the legal content. This website can help you get through that kind of situation easier.

Sabrina Wright is a vibrant young law writer currently writing her next big project. Her modern outlook on the law field is reflected on her informative pieces. Sabrina loves cooking and often invites her friends over for barbecue.