andr0id

Are you also a pilot? This is an awful lot of self awareness for a motor vehicle operator.

noisebeam

The NYT continues their series on driving distracted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/te...g.html?_r=1&hp

Truck drivers 23x more likely to crash when texting.

A 22yr old (non truck driver) admits to texting while driving all the time
"“I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.”
“I’m pretty sure that someday it’s going to come back to bite me,” he said of his behavior. (as will possibly his admission of the risk in writing prior to any future accident)

Ed Holland

...is what he should have been thinking

I'd love to know what it is about these devices (or humans) that is demanding of our attention to the point of over-riding a sense of personal safety

John E

An automatic transmission arguably makes many drivers safer, by removing a mechanical distraction and chance for error. Also, a clutch pedal is no fun in the stop-and-go traffic I so often encounter. Having had my left knee immobilized for a four-week and later a two-week period and having been essentially without the use of my right hand for a different two-week interval, I have yet another reason to prefer automatic transmissions, although I admittedly favor the Tiptronic and others with a modicum of manual override control.

The transmission is merely a tool. Inattentive or distracted driving is the problem.

______
Disclaimer: both of my sons chose manual transmissions and do not seem to have regretted doing so

Ed Holland

...but you loose all the fun of heel and toe double declutched downshifts

Road Fan

There's an SAE committee on Safety and Human Factors, that did a study on distraction, and came up with a standard. One may argue if it should go farther, but it pretty well represented what could be agreed on about 6 years ago. It states that control actions for in-vehicle equipment should not take longer than 15 seconds. For the driver to "sample" the driving environment every 15 seconds is enough, in the context of infrequent tasks to adjust the audio system or climate control. This ruling has been used to support the decision most automakers have made, to prevent destinations from being selected or new ones entered while the car is moving. I think those actions would be much more distracting than phone conversations because they involve text processing, a complex human interface, and an unnatural way of entering text and making commands. OTOH, a dear friend of mine (a serious classical musician) once drove through a red light because she was concentrating on the music playing on the audio system. That's a great example of cognitive distraction.

I'm not a cognitive scientist, but I've worked with them for years as part of advanced equipment design. I also stayed with them at a Holiday Inn ...

Road Fan

A group of tradeoffs: reduced mental and physical workload versus the potential for reduced activation or alertness. Many things can be done and have been tested in cars to reduce workload (I've worked on roughly a half-dozen), but at what point does the driver become disengaged, and at what point does the presence of automation bring in its own new piles of potential liability?

Road Fan

Once when in the UK a while back I saw an amazing billboard: a driver in a car clearly a manual transmission, holding in his hands a cell phone, a cigarette, a can of beer, and a stick of something to eat. The message on the sign was something like, "do you really want to answer the telly?"

noisebeam

There was a series of red light camera photos published a while ago. One of them showed a driver with a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other pressed on ear- clearly no hands on steering wheel. All while running a red light traveling at ~15mph over PSL. This was real, not some advert.
I posted a link to it on BF back then, but it is no longer available.

Ed Holland

An interesting exchange with driver this morning:

Me (tap tap on window) "Would you please put the phone down?"

Him (lowers window) "My mom just got out of surgery, so you can f^&* off!"

Me "OK, I'm sorry but don't have me in surgery as well, please put the phone down, thank you"

Him "f- off, just f- off, f- off!"

At this point the bike lane allowed me to progress more quickly than the motor traffic, so I waited until he passed again and could not resist blowing a big kiss and making a camp "bye darling darling" wave.

Good grief, if family medical matters were soooooooo important, they are worth stopping the car so you can concentrate fully on the situation - just what can you learn that gives you an advantage when you're only 5 minutes from the medical centre? I'm just glad I didn't let him make me angry.

His mother woul be so proud.

Ed

ItsJustMe

Personally I have a very hard time understanding people on phones in a car. Granted, I have a cheap-ass phone, and my car isn't a Lexus so it's not terribly quiet in the car. But I have no problems understanding what people in the car are saying, but on the phone I have to press the phone to my ear and concentrate to understand them.

mattotoole

VT News has a good summary of the Virginia Tech study cited in that NYT article.

In the wake of that study, the US Senate has introduced a bill for a nationwide ban on texting while driving. States would have to pass their own bans, or lose 25% of their federal highway funds.

Virginia passed its own ban this year, which went into effect July 1 -- largely thanks to our own Bud Vye, if you'll allow me to toot VBF's horn.

invisiblehand

This is the scary part of the NY Times article ...

“It’s convenient,” said Robert Smith, 22, a recent college graduate in Windham, Me. He says he regularly texts and drives even though he recognizes that it is a serious risk. He would rather text, he said, than take time on a phone call.

“I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.”

Mr. Smith, who was not part of the AAA survey, said he was surprised by the findings in the new research about texting.

“I’m pretty sure that someday it’s going to come back to bite me,” he said of his behavior.

That is, even after being told how dangerous texting is, he still plans on continuing the behavior.

Ed Holland

That's because everyone thinks they can beat the system. Put another way the mentality is always "I'm not like those other drivers"

invisiblehand

You mean being held liable after the fact?

Ed Holland

That too. But what I really meant was the perception that we all have to some degree: "I'm a good driver, it's those other people that you need to watch out for"