Man Cited for Eating a Cheeseburger While Driving

Drive-thru enthusiasts, let this be a warning. A man got a ticket in an Atlanta suburb last week, after a police officer observed him driving for two miles while eating a cheeseburger — specifically, a double quarter pounder with cheese.

“[The officer] said specifically three times, you can’t just go down the road eating a hamburger,” Madison Tuner told WSB-TV. “Maybe I was enjoying the burger too much I needed to tone it down. I was certainly willing to do so but I didn’t expect to be fined or punished.”

Turner, from Alabama, was cited by Cobb County authorities for violating Georgia distracted driving laws, and will have his day in court on Feb. 3. The amount that Turner will have to pay was unclear.

A 2012 study from out of the University of Leeds found that drivers have a 44% slower reaction time than usual. That’s more significant than using a phone (which decreases reaction time by 37.4%) and alcohol at the legal limit (which slows things by 12.5%).

And for those who have beef with the food in question — “Maybe if you had a giant pizza in both hands and you weren’t holding the wheel or maybe if you had a watermelon, half watermelon and you were just diving into it holding it with both hands, maybe that would be something,” a traffic attorney told WSB-TV — a 2009 study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 80% of all car accidents involved drivers who were eating. The biggest food culprit was burgers.

[WSB-TV]