drake

drake

A recent challenge saw many people jump out of a moving car while dancing to Drake’s song In My Feelings.  If you saw any of these, some were incredible.  But, there were also some that were downright horrible.  Not only horrible but incredibly unsafe. In many instances, the people getting out of the car to dance, couldn’t necessarily judge how fast the car was going and ended up falling down.  While I don’t know if they actually hurt themselves, one can only imagine.  In another instance, I saw a young girl get out of the car on the freeway to do the challenge.  You could see transport trucks behind her, honking and that is another kind of unsafe.

But now the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is asking people to stop doing the #InMyFeelings challenge because of the fact that it’s so unsafe. The NTSB says “driver distraction features prominently in this viral challenge, but the more obvious risk is the poor decision to hop out of a moving vehicle to dance.  Although “bad decision making” is not on our [list of poor driver behaviors], we have seen a variety of crashes attributed to making poor choices”. That’s a convoluted way of saying that this particular bad behavior didn’t feature prominently in terms of what they were expecting.  But it’s bad behavior nonetheless.

How did this get started?  Well, per usual, it started as a meme through a dance that was featured on @TheShiggyShow.  Not only afterward, videos started popping up on social media showing people jumping out of moving cars. Of course, this is incredibly dangerous, but in some cases, people were able to nail it.  No, I’m not advocating bad behavior, but I am simply conveying my thoughts on the quality of the videos.  Then, there are people who have no idea what they’re doing.  Case in point – one individual planned to jump out of a car, dance, and then hop on the hood of another moving car. However, he slipped on a wet spot on the pavement and got hit by the car instead, luckily suffering only bruises and scratches.

While I’m happy to hear that they are issuing this alert, I feel like it’s a bit too late.  This challenge is dwindling out, and new ones are coming out and going viral.  They are the government, after all, we can’t expect them to issue any kind of appropriate warning on time.  The NTSB managed to mildly threaten young drivers, but they also took a different approach.  One that might actually resonate with young drivers, which was to mock them.  Well, in their own way:

“We have studied the particular challenges faced by teen drivers, and we have long focused on graduated driver licensing laws in part to gradually introduce young and novice drivers to the roadway environment. Now, it appears that certain drivers and passengers are intent on being introduced to that environment in a more literal way.”

Regardless, the #InMyFeelings challenge is dangerous – for both yourself and anyone on the road with you at the same time.  As I said, this one is winding down, but there will be more, so please just be safe when attempting to get your 15 minutes of fame on social media.