I was reading the news today about a local man who, while reaching for his cell phone, managed to sideswipe three other cars, including a Florida Highway Patrol Cruiser, a Windermere police car and one other car, sending three people to the hospital. All he needed was a FBI agent to score a trifecta.
This brings up the issue of distracted driving. As people spend more time in their cars commuting to and from their jobs, for many people the car is actually the normal place to make phone calls. I have friends, who if they didn't call me from their cars, I would never hear from at all.
Some studies have shown that making cell phone calls while you're driving actually impairs your attention as much as being legally intoxicated. The trouble is that the legislative response to this problem has been to require using hands-free cell phones. Other studies have shown that this is useless because the problem is caused by the driver being distracted by the phone call, not the fact that one hand is holding the phone. When people are engaged in a conversation, most of their brain is occupied processing the verbal information. The eyes still see, but the brain doesn't process the information.
The fact of the matter is, that if there was a ban on using cell phones while driving that the worst offenders probably would be our state representatives. As I see it, the problem isn't with the talking while driving, but with the driving. Driving is an enormously boring activity that screams for distractions. Before cell phones, people would be listening to the radio, eating breakfast, doing their makeup or shaving or even reading the newspaper while driving.
As far as I'm concerned, the only long-term solution to the problem is Robocars. Go check out Brad Templeton's blog on Robocars linked below. The main problems with Robocars is legal not technical. A Robocar can be 10 times safer than a car with a human driver, but that 10% is a rich target environment for liability lawyers. Our current legal environment requires perfect safety or nothing can be done. Liability lawyers almost destroyed the civil aviation industry in this country, before Congress passed special legislation to protect them. This means Robocars will appear in other countries before ours. We are hamstrung by our lawyers.
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