A Junior-High friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a link to Oprah Winfrey pleading to "stop distracted driving." On the face of it, a noble goal. But I'm afraid that it prompts me to respond a bit negatively here. That's just the kind of guy I am, I guess…
Obviously, everyone should drive as safely as possible. But y'know, I have a problem with the cellphone hysteria that's sweeping the nation right now, and really with the whole distracted driving thing.
The bottom line is this: driving is a task that it's stupid for humans to be doing. We weren't built for an activity like driving: we have terrible attention spans, we are poor at quick decision making, we have bad judgement about consequences, and we are terrible at estimating our own skill level. (One of my all-time favorite papers is Unskilled and Unaware Of It—check it out.) The only sane solution is to get us all out from behind the wheel forever, or at least leave driving to the most-skilled and best-trained among us. We know how to do this for most situations with technologies like trains, buses and taxis, but we have chosen to largely ignore them in favor of the individual automobile. We pay the price every day in horrible avoidable injuries and fatalities.
OK, so what can we reasonably do given the decision to let almost anyone get behind the wheel of a lethal automobile? Well, we could pick sane speed limits and enforce them ruthlessly, for starters. Our reaction times are such that anything above about 40 miles per hour is going to mean that we frequently get in trouble before we can figure out how to get out. In addition, almost all of our vehicles have very long stopping distances above this speed, compounding the reaction time problem. Again, we choose not to take this reasonable solution.
OK, well we could at least ensure that only those who have passed the extraordinarily basic vision and rules-of-the-road tests required to get a Driver's License are behind the wheel. In fact, we could require those tests to be repeated every few years, to make sure that drivers can still see and are still mentally competent. Other countries do this; Germany, for example, has a quite challenging driving test and requires regular requalification. But not here in the good ol' USA.
We also fail to do anything about drivers who either have never received a license, or who have had it revoked. I've heard estimates (that I can't find right now) that up to 30% of cars on the road in Oregon have an unlicensed driver. When these people are caught, they are simply turned loose, because there aren't enough jail beds to even begin to hold them all. If you don't jail them they're going to get back into their cars.
More than 50% of fatal highway crashes involving two or more cars include at least one intoxicated driver. About 30% of fatal crashes involve a sleep-deprived driver. (For the math-challenged, that doesn't necessarily mean that 80% involve one or the other—some percentage will likely have both.) We could make determined efforts to get both these kinds of drivers off the road by, for example, requiring a brief in-car cognitive test before an automobile would start. We do tackle drunks, but the sleep-deprived we address hardly at all.
So why are drunks, and more recently cellphone users, the big targets of our ire? I don't think it has much to do with their relative risk. I think it has more to do with our need to find scapegoats for the collection of incredibly bad decisions about driving we've made as a society. It would be nice to think that if every last drunk and cellphone user was taken off the road forever, our automotive death and injury rates would go nearly to zero. In fact, they'd likely just get slightly better…much as reducing the speed limit from 65 to 55 did before we put it back.
Oregon just put into effect a law requiring cellphone (and indeed apparently 2-way radio etc) use in the car be "hands-free" according to a loose definition. This is a classically stupid compromise. All studies that show any effect on driving quality from cellphone use are pretty unequivocal: hands-free and hands-on use are equally bad. The problem is one of cognitive processing, not manual dexterity.
Now we have a law that requires me to go out and buy an expensive and clumsy piece of equipment (and believe me, I've tried many) for no increase in road safety. Why did we do that to ourselves? I think it's because there's no way our state was going to ban in-car cellphone use altogether, but we couldn't live with ourselves if we didn't try to do something. So we did something useless.
As long as we let anyone who wants to drive a car really fast, a lot of people are going to get hurt and killed. Pleas to stop distracted driving are well and good. But we really need to stop all driving, or be willing to pay its terrible price.
Of course, Oprah seems largely to be concerned about driver texting. And hey, that's just crazy. (B)