AAA Safety: Driver’s Aid or Driver’s Distraction?
An internet-free safety phone
A ton of steel hurtling down the road can cause an awful lot of damage when something gets in its way. That something is usually the injured party so it makes sense to keep the high speed block of metal under close control at all times. By definition, distractions reduce driver awareness and so should be minimised. Sensible thinking but technological advances mean there is constant pressure to include increasingly sophisticated devices in the car to make the driver’s life easier. So when does a driver’s aid become a driver’s distraction?
The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has reported on research in the US to measure the degree to which various devices reduce driver attention. The project challenges the notion that there is more to safety than keeping the driver’s eyes fixed on the road and hands glued to the wheel; it is the driver’s brain that needs to be engaged. To measure cognitive distraction, drivers were given a selection of tasks with rising complexity to see how this impacted on their vehicle control. There were eight tasks, ranging from listening to the radio to emailing by speech recognition, all being hands-free except for the hand-held mobile phone task. No task asked that the driver take their eyes off the road.
The study found that the radio listening task (presumably to music) added only slightly to the driver’s workload. Listening to a book-on-tape was significantly more distractive and this could probably be extended to speech-based radio programmes. At the next most attention robbing level was chatting to a passenger or on a mobile, with hands-free mobile conversations being only slightly safer than both. Much worse was attempting to converse with speech-recognition software, probably because the intelligence is all on one side.
The conclusion of the research was that hands-free does not mean risk-free. This should set the alarm bells ringing amongst the car industry boffins because they were hoping to continue differentiating their products from the competition by offering evermore sophisticated technology for driver interaction. They believed that as long as the eyes and hands are not distracted then they have the full attention of the brain, but this is not the case. One could even take this further and suggest that if the first priority is to keep the brain operating at full capacity then the new technologies should be managing attention levels rather than maintaining them at their energy sapping peak. If the aim is to keep driver attention at 100% then fatigue will set in and it will fall to, say, 75%. On long journeys it might be better to offer “distractions”, such as music and hands-free telephone conversations, if this means a more sustainable attention rate of 90%. As an anecdotal example from experience, I found as a young truck driver that it was better to physically relax trundling down the highway so that I was more mentally prepared for the stresses of the by-ways. Mind you, I wouldn’t recommend my brief experiment driving with feet resting on the dashboard.
Of course, many of the distractions are outside the car and on roads of hysterical warning signs it sometimes seems easy to miss the real dangers. I wonder how many of us have peered into the rear-view mirror trying to figure out what the car behind might be trying to signal to us, only to realise that the flashing is its daytime running lights. Attracting attention to a car must inevitably mean taking attention away from something else, in this case the road in front. As has been shown by the new shared road spaces, where pedestrians and vehicles mingle, sometimes it is better to rely on your own eyeballs.
Link: https://www.aaafoundation.org/measuring-cognitive-distractions
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