Rethinking Distracted Driving
Edmunds recent Auto Safety Conference featured a number of high-profile speakers including NHTSA Administrator David Strickland, Edmunds CEO Jeremy Anwyl, IIHS President Adrian Lund, Toyota Under Fire author Tim Ogden, Rep John Dingell and more. I haven’t had time to watch all of the presentations from the conference, but from what I’ve seen, the conference seems to have been one of the most forward-thinking, diverse and lively explorations of auto safety in recent memory. The video above, featuring Virginia Tech professor Tom Dingus, offers enough provocative insights to fuel a lengthy discussion on distracted driving, but I encourage you to go check out the rest of the speakers here, and if you really want to get stuck in, you can download their presentations here.
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Observer Effect anyone? Cameras in cars don't change behavior?
It's truly sad that now some people are going to spend time in the conferences, obtain government grants for studies, earn honorariums, etc etc ad nauseum, all to prove the obvious - anything but the car controls and a radio IS a distraction. See, simple! But can't make a scientific career out of it.
I pay less attention to the road when I'm OFF the phone and it's the ON the phone driving when I'm more aware of traffic and the task of driving. I know I'm a hundred times more likely to crash OFF the phone that ON. Maybe that's just me or it's human nature but I've only crashed once since there's been cell phones and I wasn't ON one. Middle of the day and I was reaching for a map and then add all the near misses I've had including running redlights that had long been red all while OFF the phone. Part of the problem is we tend to get bored while driving and start to observe sports cars, pickup trucks, billboards, houses, babes on the street, babes in other cars and what we would do to them. You know, like lower them, lift them or plant trees out front.
He said something along these lines - 10% of the drivers cause 50% of the crashes or near crashes. I found that very interesting. It seems like a fruitful place for more study. Do these people behave differently than most? Do they have different spacial perception? Different cognitive ability? Can we train them to be better, or are they hopeless?