Driving While Talking on a Cell Phone = Driving While Drunk
How many of you see incidents in traffic where someone is clearly not fully
"there?" Raise your hands. Yep. Almost everyone sees that on a daily
basis. Sometimes on my relatively short drive to work (about seven miles) I
see a "cell phone driver" and follow them, counting the number of
times they brake for no apparent reason, run stop signs, turn without signals,
go off the road, or cross the center line. It's truly amazing.
As you may know, I am a serious multitasker and defend my right to be such
at work and at home. But as good as I am at that, I've tested myself with cell
phones while driving (with a family member watching to take over the wheel)
and I cannot safely drive and talk on a cell phone. It has nothing to do with
my hands being busy, it has to do with my brain being engaged elsewhere, trying
to figure out the 70 percent of communication that's nonverbal, while I can
only hear someone's voice.
This is more of a rant than you might usually hear from me. Partly that's because
I was almost killed by a cell phone driver a year ago. As I drove my car through
the intersection of Fifth and Liberty, in Ann Arbor, a fellow in a very large
pickup truck driving west on William Street, talking on the cell phone, ran
right through the red light and smashed into my right front end at 30 mph. Luckily,
I was driving my red Suburban, "Clifford the Big Red Truck," instead
of "Cliffy," my tiny little Chevy Aveo, which I can almost drive up
into the rear compartment of Clifford. I was uninjured, but I lost the use of
Clifford for a week or more.
Just a few weeks ago, I was driving home on Waters Road, a dirt road with very
little traffic, and I saw a fellow driving out his several-hundred foot driveway
a couple of hundred yards ahead of me, on the right. Now, there was no other
traffic, and when this new mini-mansion he was driving away from was built,
the developer bulldozed all the trees and bushes, so there was no sight-line
issue.
At the speed I was driving, 40 mph, he and I would arrive at the end of his
driveway at the same time, but I could see he had his hand up to his ear, so
I slowed down to arrive just after he got there. Sure enough, even though I
was less than 30 feet away, he didn't even slow down as he hit the end of his
driveway and turned up Waters Road towards me. He hadn't even seen me, and would
have smashed into me if I had not accommodated him.
My personal theory about American drivers is that most of us learn in our youth
to drive at the very limit of our driving capabilities. (Recent research on
brain maturation shows that for many, good decision-making d'esn't begin to
happen until age 25.) So, as adults, because that's how we taught ourselves
and it became a habit, we're always pushing to go faster and faster and be right
on the edge. When something happens to make either the driving environment more
difficult (fog, traffic) or to impede our capabilities (alcohol, cell phone
usage), we find ourselves driving as we usually do--but outside our capabilities,
and bad things start to happen.
A new study in the journal Human Factors, published by the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society estimates that cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths
and 330,000 injuries each year. Here's a link to an article in
Live
Science about that study. How did this come about? How is it becoming accepted
that people who are as incapacitated by cell phone usage as people who are legally
drunk with high blood alcohol, find it responsible to drive and be such menaces?
Yes, the same scientists have found that people chatting on cell phones drive
like people with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08 percent.
What technologies are next in cars and who's going to be responsible for the
damage? Well, wireless Internet, speech recognition systems, and e-mail are
all slated to be in cars soon. Who's responsible for the damage they'll cause,
and who asked us if we thought it was okay?
Already we hear news reports and anecdotal reports from friends about seeing
people watching movies while they drive, even pornographic movies. Just last
night I was followed, way too closely, for a while by a guy who had his laptop
propped up on his steering wheel.
I'd like to see automobile manufacturers held responsible for the misuse of
technologies put into moving vehicles. Yes, I know about "personal responsibility,"
but I believe that extends to understanding and being responsible for the consequences
of what you do--including the design and safety of the products that you make.
It d'es an innocent auto victim no good at all to have relied on the "personal
responsibility" of a cell phone driver who mangles them in an accident
and then hasn't the funds to recompense them.
We need standards for deciding about the appropriate use of information technology
in automobiles, along with a lot of consumer behavior research to determine
what people are actually going to do with those technologies. There should be
a role for colleges and universities to play in that research, since few would
trust such research conducted by the auto companies.
If we don't have reasonable standards, and research to back them up, well then
I guess it continues to be a good thing that we're also graduating all those
trial lawyers.
