What Should I Do About Distracted Driving?

Just wondering if, of the 81 deaths due to distracted driving, how many that casued the accident were stopped a red light at the time. My guess would be zero.

The examples you gave were excellent cases of true distracted driving, save one... the guy texting at a red light. The fact is that there are other things in the car that require a measure of attention - other people, the radio/music, GPS, heat/ac, reading huge billboard advertisments as we cross bridges and so on. If we can't do these things while stopped at a light then when? I an loathe to hear about cops hiding in bushes to catch 'distracted drivers' at a red lights. It reeks of cash grab and I don't belive that it will necessarily curb the practice of doing these things while you are actually driving.

Oh, but they hold us up when the lights turn green, people say. Perhaps but then we give them a light tap of the horn... the same thing we have been doing for decades when someone gets caught after the light change looking in the glove box or changing the station or screaming at the kids in the backseat. Hey, if we really want to reduce distracted driving... let's ban kids from cars!

Do something genuinely useful: lobby your politicians (provincial and federal) for immediate changes to standard equipment requirements for new vehicles. The technology exists, and has existed for years, to prevent distraction from resulting in: rear end collisions, overspeed, dangerous lane changes, wandering out of lane, backing collisions, pedestrian strikes, and numerous forward collision types and severities. There is no good or accpetable reason to continue allowing the practice of "bundling" these features with luxury items such as infotainment systems and leather, nor is there any acceptable reason to delay implementation of regulations requiring these proven technologies to be installed as standard.

Furthermore, these technologies should, as much as technically feasible, be made increasingly available in the aftermarket for retrofit of the existing fleet. We can't all just dig a hole and bury our current car, we need to make those safer too. 

Why? The answer is in the interminable nagging about distracted driving. The problem is that distraction is inevitable, as is other human error, during the driving task. Nobody, absolutely nobody, drives perfectly, without attention to "secondary attentional tasks", or small and large mistakes, all the time. This is not because people are, in the main, careless, malicious, or foolish. Certainly examples can always be found of these concerns, and they should be addressed, but the fact is that the vast majority of drivers are just trying to get back and forth as part of their day, whatever else it entails.

What we know, and we do indeed know this, is that even though driver error and driver condition account for the generally accepted 80 or 90% of collisions, this does not mean that the best way to reduce collisions is to focus primarily on reducing driver error or oherwise improving drivers. We've been doing that for years, with little effect. Still needs to be done, but not as our main set of efforts. 

Instead, we should make our primary focus the improvement of the driving condition - safer vehicles, safer roadways, safer speeds. It has been improvements in safety equipment, infrastructure, (think roundabouts), and regulation that have posted the majority of improvements in traffic outcomes over the past fifty years, not the evolution of a new human being. So: less pointless nagging, more re-direction of public and private resources into making roadways and vehicles safer, so that the inevitable human errors will not result in tragedy. If we're going to point fingers, then let's point them at what works, rather than at each other.

Want to know more? Look up Vision Zero, the international campaign to reduce traffic fatalities/injuries. Also NHTSA, IIHS, and CARSP for research on what works, and why. The site "Mycardoeswhat" offers good information about what's currently available, because consumers seem to be in the dark about the safety technologies in their current vehicles, let alone what else is out there. Neil Arsason's "No Accident" probably gives us the best Canadian overview of the field.

Excellent review of the state of the autonomous car's development, although Car and Driver hardly represents the sort of independent scientific authority the world of traffic safety should be looking to. However, not at all what my statement about crash and injury prevention technologies being extant and proven referred to, which will be apparent by reading of the references cited.

The ubiquitous issues with driver distraction are well known, perhaps best described on a scientific basis by the Naturalistic Driving Studies over the past decade or so. That they go well beyond the contemporary fixation on cell phone use has been obvious to anyone giving the matter serious thought. Which is exactly why we must move beyond simply yelling at drivers to "pay attention", and get on with equipping drivers and other road users with the infrastructure and technologies that will prevent inevitable distractions and other errors from resulting in needless death and injury. And these elements do exist, have been tested in real world application by responsible independent and peer-reviewed scientific research (as previously noted). The dramatic reduction in collision rates, and the consequent reduction of death and injury rates, generated by Electronic Stability Control, for instance, is incontrovertible, was known for many years, and finally resulted in the regulations requiring that it be mandatory standard equipment for model year 2012. It will, however, be 2042 before ESC populates the majority of the North American vehicle fleet (see IIHS on the point).

That's the problem. Given the extremely long lag time between the implementation of a safety regulation and its broad application, it is imperative that we move much more quickly to adopt and standardize safety technologies and engineering as soon as they are proven, rather than wait, as we have done, for the "pressure of the market" to bring them to the majority of the road users.

On the subject of the autonomous vehicle: the development stage we're at, in terms of actual production vehicles, is the semi-autonomous vehicle, capable of operating on "autopilot" if you will, for some portions of some trips reliably. This stage has been variously tested in Europe for some time, and they are now establishing "real world" testing/operational sites on motorways and in communities, where vehicles from various manufacturers (Ford, Volvo, Renault, BMW et al) can be operated in the normal course of daily driving in different levels of semi-autonomous control. The expectation that reduced collison/injury/fatality rates will be reduced by this level of driver aid is grounded in the assessment of those rates as they have already been reduced by preceeding collision prevention systems, such as emergency brake assist and autobrake.

The suggestion that increased safety technologies and infrastructures will break the bank is rather dramatically disproven by the very substantial investments the industries are making in them, as well as by the fact that the auto industry as a whole has rather nicely managed to recover from the dreadful financial impacts industry analysts feared would follow the implementation of mandatory seatbelt installation. And every other safety regulation since.  

So, here's another source of information about what's being accomplished in traffic safety: Traffic Technology International  - available online and/or in print. Read. Blow your mind. 

Ride safe(r).