Busiest Travel Day: Tips and Tricks
The day before Thanksgiving marks the busiest travel day of the year, with airports and highways flooded with the traffic of those heading home for the holidays. It is equal parts exciting and frustrating, but it can also be dangerous. The busiest travel day of the year brings record numbers of car accidents, thefts, and spreading illnesses; but we are capable of taking steps to protect ourselves.
Traffic Warnings
The busiest travel day affects roads as much as airports, with traffic leading to higher numbers of DUIs, crashes, and distracted drivers.
This is in part because busy roads are not high reliability systems. Especially on holidays, when families travel with young children and a stash of food and often alcohol, there are many opportunities to be distracted. Even if you are perfectly focused, someone else on the road is probably not, and so drivers must be aware of the possibility of others’ failure as much as their own.
For example, it is a common assumption that slow traffic serves as an opportunity to take your eyes off the road, perhaps to text your friends and family that you’re “practically parked.” In reality, the closeness and constant breaking of a car in dense traffic make it easier than usual to get into a fender bender. Furthermore, if you are in a car with harsh brakes, headaches or carsickness can serve as a further distraction or impairment.
Because of this, it is often a good idea to bring along ibuprofen or acetaminophen in order to decrease headaches or carsickness. Defensive driving also enables drivers to protect themselves in heavy traffic, and limiting in-car distractions by using hands free devices can help decrease the amount of accidents caused by this oversight. The most important thing you can do in heavy traffic is to stay calm, and keep your eyes and ears open for possible dangers.
Running Late
When you’re running late, everything becomes an emergency. A time crunch causes panic and costs money whether you’re driving to catch a flight, forgetting your phone charger at home, losing your airplane ticket, or unable to find your gate. This is perhaps the most well-known danger of travel days, and yet many continue to unknowingly put themselves into the exact situation that they know will distress them. Here are some of the ways you can ensure you do not fall into the “definition of insanity,” by falling into this problem again and again.
Firstly, keeping as little packing as possible to the day of can help you get out the door sooner. Some things like toothbrushes or medications might not be able to be packed beforehand, but keeping an itemized list to go through before you leave can allow you to know you haven’t left anything behind. For everything else, it is good to start packing at least a full week in advance, giving you ample time to add necessary items and consider what might be missing. That way you won’t be rushing to pack before walking out the door, or rushing back home to collect what you’ve forgotten.
Airports bring with them an altogether different set of problems when running late. The possibility of missing a flight or getting lost in an airport is terrifying because it comes with the enormous price tag of an airline ticket. The best advice for avoiding this stress is to arrive at the airport several hours early, in order to comfortably find your gate and eat a meal if necessary. In the last hour and a half before you board your flight, avoid restaurants in other areas of the airport or with long lines in order to decrease your chances of missing your flight.
The Sickening Truth
It’s cold and flu season and you’re in the midst of a crowded, busy area. Illness prowls around every corner, and there’s nothing you can do to run away from it. How do you protect yourself?
On busy travel days, the chances of becoming sick increases significantly. It comes naturally with the gathering of numerous people into small places, such as airports or train stations, during the beginning of the cold season; but it does put a damper on vacation plans. The best ways to avoid getting sick when you travel are to load up on Vitamin C two weeks in advance to build up your immune system and to wash your hands often throughout the trip. You can also bring hand sanitizer or baby wipes, in case the lines to the airport bathrooms are too long to risk.
Even if you rarely get sick, it never hurts to protect your trip from disaster by taking the necessary precautions to keep both you and your loved ones safe.
Crime Galore
Yet another danger lurks in busy airports and train stations: the endless potential for crimes of opportunity. Pickpockets, traffickers, and kidnappers often take advantage of crowded areas full of distracted people. It is extremely important to keep an eye on all members of your traveling party and ensure that everyone has a method by which to contact one another both available and functioning before entering these crowded spaces.
When it comes to thieves or pickpockets, there are a number of preventative measures you can take to protect your items. Most importantly, if you want to keep what you have, keep it with you. Busy travel areas provide ample opportunities for thieves to pick up abandoned suitcases or purses left on seats while their owners run to the bathroom or to get food. If they see your hand on the handle or the purse on your arm, a thief is much more likely to leave you alone.
For pickpockets, there are a number of new technologies that make it so they don’t even have to get into your bags to rob you. Most people know that using bags with covered zippers or crossbody bags that can be hidden under your jacket protects you from sticky fingers, but in the modern day we can also protect ourselves with RFID blocking fabric.
RFID readers or skimmers can steal important information from phones, credit card chips, and even car keys through the fabric of a cross body bag, wallet, or purse. A bag made of RFID blocking fabric protects your information without requiring you to keep an eye out for shifty figures in the crowd.
Happy Holidays from TapRooT®
Overall, being aware of the dangers of a situation before you go into it can help to prevent disasters and give you the peace of mind to enjoy your holiday season. A lot of the understanding necessary to be safe in a dangerous travel situation applies very similarly to the workplace. Danger of pickpocketing? Wearing the right PPE with RFID blocking fabric makes it so you can focus on what’s important. Worried about leaving something at home? A good proactive procedure should help protect you from making that mistake.
At System Improvements, we are constantly rooting for the better safety skills that could save your peace of mind, and even your life. Our TapRooT® System helps companies to enjoy improved safety structures by providing world-class Root Cause Analysis. If you want to find out what we can do for your company, schedule a free executive briefing with us here.
