Walking Drunk is Deadly

Cremations are one of the cremation services offered in Greenbelt, MD. Some people who die and are cremated have died untimely deaths after being hit by a vehicle while they are walking. Pedestrian deaths are an increasing concern in areas that experiencing a high rate of growth and the increasing vehicle traffic that comes with that growth.

Many pedestrians who are killed are not doing anything wrong or illegal. They are walking in designated walking areas, such as sidewalks or walking trails, or they are legally crossing streets in designated crosswalks going with the traffic flow.

Drivers have become much more careless and less attentive because of all the distractions that can happen inside a vehicle. Distractions can include looking down to see who texted them or a social media update, checking GPS directions, or finding a song on a streaming music service. Distractions can also include talking to other passengers, eating, grooming, or picking something up that fell on the floor.

It takes only an instant of distraction to put pedestrians’ lives in mortal danger. Pedestrians are extremely vulnerable to being killed when they’re hit by a vehicle because they have no protection against the weight and force of something that weighs between 4,000 (the approximate weight of a passenger vehicle) and 80,000 pounds (this is the approximate weight of fully-loaded tractor-trailer trucks).

These kinds of deadly accidents happen every day, and nobody who is walking for recreation or simply to get from one side of the street to the other is immune to become a victim of them.

However, people who spent the night drinking pose another kind of pedestrian death hazard. When the restaurants and bars begin to close in the wee hours of the morning, the sidewalks and streets have more people who are not entirely sober walking on them.

When people aren’t sober, they are less aware of their surroundings and potential dangers. Alcohol dulls the senses so that people may think they’re walking, for instance, on a sidewalk or well of the road, when they are actually walking in the middle of the road.

Alcohol slows thinking perception and reaction time. When someone who is not sober decides to walk across a street, the time between the moment they decide it’s safe to cross the street and the moment they actually do it is significantly longer than for someone who is sober.

So, while it may have been safe to cross the street when they made the decision, it was not safe to cross by the time they did it. However, because perception is also altered under the influence of alcohol, the walker may have thought it was safe to cross the street when it, in fact, was not.

Alcohol also severely affects balance. So, when someone who is not sober is walking, they may zigzag between being on a sidewalk and not or safely off the side of the road and suddenly on the road.

All of these factors make walking drunk a potentially deadly action. Often, when drunk pedestrians are hit by a vehicle, the driver will say they came out of nowhere and it was impossible to stop in time to avoid hitting them.

The best solution to this is to have someone sober drive them home, even if “it’s just around the corner.” Whether that’s a designated driver, a taxi, or rideshare, it’s a much safer alternative to walking when a person has been drinking.

If you want information about cremation services offered in Greenbelt, MD, you can talk with our expert staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A. You can drop by our funeral home at 4400 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD, 20705, or you can contact us today at (301) 937-1707.