Distracted Driving

Next time you watch, watch this gem by Werner Herzog...

 

Was it in "The Gods Must be Crazy", there's a few really off-the-wall scenes involving automobiles? One where the driver gets out and walks beside the jeep, as it rolls across a plain at a walking pace. And another where a jeep winches itself up into a tree? The automobile was a running joke in that movie.

Yup:

 

Kids watch DVDs in the back seats, I try to watch for traffic. Never watched a video as the driver. Have found myself totally immersed in some interesting talk radio segment or courses on CD though.

 

SeriusXM's radio dramas were good. Can't abide their business model though.

 

The Prius offers more feedback "As Is"- that's without possible DVD's or Scanguage's plugged in.

Often I think the challenge with Prius is to get to the grass roots of safe driving. That is..not paying attention to all the graphs, and percentages and averages The Prius will tell you about.

So no...I don't drive any road watching a movie. I strive to drive most all roads...watching the road.

By the way, I've watched the documentary referenced above.

What you realize pretty quickly hearing these stories, is that with a motor vehicle, a split second of inattentiveness can quickly lead to tragedy. Leaving people dead and people alive...suffering.

It's gut wrenching to not only recognize the lives lost..but also the fallout that impacts families, friends and survivors. Those that survive often have to then find a way to continue living.

To the OP? Greg?
I'm guessing you don't mean to be so serious in your query. But the absolute truth is that in operating a motor vehicle...any time, any where...you can't really afford to make the decision to be purposely inattentive to anything.

 

Nothing for me to fess up to. I didn't even get a real smart phone until a few weeks ago, and didn't buy enough data from Tracfone to be watching videos at all, from anywhere.

I know my multitasking ability is below average, and declining with age. Sometimes I have to shush people who assume my multitasking must be equally as good as they assume their own to be.

 

Whenever I find myself lacking in todays multi-tasking abilities, I defend my single minded attention to singular tasks as the lost art of craftsmanship!

And even though I'm joking....I think there is some truth to it. Kids today can do 5 things at once...but they all turn out crappy.

 

I'm a bicyclist and I've had 1 friend killed while cycling because a driver took attention away from the road while looking around for a cassette tape. I also had an aquaintance seriously injured because of something similiar (I don't know why attention was diverted.)

It only takes a second to drop a tire off of the pavement, hit a child, cyclist, jogger, parent, another car, whatever. I'm far from perfect but I never allow anything video in the front seat. While I will only occasionally take a phone call while driving it is scary how many people I see with a phone glued to the side of their face. Or worse, reading the paper or a novel (Atlanta downtown traffic) while driving.

Some of the worst are the people farding in their car. (look it up)

 

Distracted driving.
We all do it.
We've all done it.

Still.....I can make an argument that distracted driving is a much worse act than drunk driving.
At least drunks have the excuse of having their higher brain functions altered by alcohol.
People who text and drive (to pick on my favorites) are IMHO much bigger jerks because most of them make an informed, sober decision to endanger other peoples lives for purely selfish reasons.

I remember a time when drunk driving was not treated as the purely criminal act that it is today. When I went to high school, if the LEOs caught a bunch of us out drinking and driving they would make us pour out the booze and have the sober(est) person drive everybody else home. The really stern officers would also call some of the parents.
If somebody injured or killed another driver then it was much more likely that the offender would pay in civil, rather than legal court.

Then?
In the 80's the butcher's bill reached a tipping point, and Moms got mad!
In 1984, the moms were instrumental in a getting a law passed where if the individual states don't adopt certain federal "guidelines" (drinking age, sobriety limits, etc..) then they lose federal highway funds.

Now?
Drunk driving is taken much more seriously in the US. It's not just a ticket any more.
It's going to take a similar series of events to make poking a piece of glass or watching TV while driving as serious as an issue as it ought to be.
Nobody is ever going to have one text too many and drive 85MPH the wrong way down an interstate and kill 27 people (**) and so there aren't going to be the spectacular incidents that rapidly drive new laws into existence (pun almost unintended.)
However (comma!!!) there is going to continue to be a low level of a$$holery out there until we reach a point where cell phone handset use at an intersection is as socially acceptable as tipping up a bottle of Jack Daniels.....and generates the same number of police complaints.



(**) The driver of the this accident, Larry, actually has a valid driver's license today. I don't have a problem with that particularly but it points to the complexity of the issue. YMMV

 

Good points here.
One other to consider is that the number of texting drivers is likely to be one or two orders of magnitude greater than drunk drivers at any given time (except maybe New Year's Eve). Just imagine DRUNK TEXTING drivers!!!

I also live in Atlanta and have ridden up US400 (while my wife drove) just counting the number of texting drivers as we passed them or vice versa. If I recall correctly we passed several hundred cars and about 20% of them were looking at the phone in their hand. I wasn't even counting the ones talking on the phone.

Highway signs in ATL note that a driver is 23x more likely to be involved in a wreck while texting than while not texting. Not sure where this stat comes from, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. See my signature below for another stat tested by Car and Driver magazine. Click on the link to see the supporting evidence.

Sadly, as noted above, it will simply take additional highway carnage (and lots of it) before society recognizes texting while driving as a danger worth doing something about.

 

Way back over a decade ago I was driving a long empty and straight hwy with a book on the steering wheel preparing for very important licensing exam. I passed, BTW.

Several years prior to that, I was very poor and could not afford flying or dining out. I was driving long stretches of hwy (probably the same one: midwest to east coast and back) while interviewing for a job and ate my meals from cans while driving. Opening a can while driving was a bit tricky. The car did not have cruise control BTW (nor it had fuel injection, LOL).

Now, it was way safer compared to what people do with texting now (I don't).

 

That reminds me the road trip I took with my wife when we were newlyweds. We were driving cross country and got lost somewhere in Arizona desserts (no GPS in early 90's of course). I was driving and she was a navigator (little I knew at that time). Since she had problems locating us on the map, I tried to help. By the time I looked up, we were on the shoulder, and there was not much of anything outside the shoulder. I stopped and we traded places because I was shaking too much to drive. I learned my lesson. Now, I know my son is like my wife. Can't use a map, must be a type of dyslexia.

 

I'm guilty of distracted driving every time I try to change the ventilation mode.