Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’ Encourages Safe Driving?
Heading out for a drive and ready to crank some of today's tunes? For a safer driving experience, start with Taylor Swift's 'Love Story.' A British company, ACF Car Finance has launched a music chart based on research that suggests listening to fast-paced rock or dance music while driving leads to more accidents.
The company compiled a list of the week's 10 biggest hits in the UK, and re-ranked them in order of safest driving tempo. Pulling in just behind Swift (a word which means, of course, moving at a fast rate of speed!), were hits by T.I. (the unfortunately titled 'Dead and Gone' featuring Justin Timberlake), The Pussycat Dolls' 'Whatcha Think About That,' 'TShirt,' by Shontelle, and the seemingly cautionary 'My Life Would Suck Without You' by Kelly Clarkson. The song that came in at No. 10 on their list, and therefore ranked as least safe: 'Just Dance' by Lady GaGa. Just keep your eyes on the road is more like it.
The study which precipitated this close chart-watching was conducted by a team of scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. They explored the effect of music tempo on driving and found that as the tempo of background music increased, so did driving speed and the driver's estimate of how fast they were actually going. The tempo of the background music also consistently affected the frequency of traffic violations, with disregarded red traffic lights, road crossings and collisions being most frequent with fast-paced tunes.
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