Today, I adopt as my column an excellent article written by my daughter, Ivy. She is a lawyer and mother of three and married to Benedict, also a lawyer:
When you drive and take your eyes off the road for two seconds, you are a distracted driver and you are 4 times more likely to have an accident. If the distraction is longer, more frequent, or affects your driving, the risk rises to 24 times.
Worldwide, over 1.25 million people die yearly from traffic accidents. That’s a road death every 25 seconds. It is the top killer of young drivers aged 15-29. (World Health Organization or WHO)
Due to rising income and car ownership, 80 percent of road deaths occur in middle income countries like the Philippines, although they only drive half of the world’s cars. (WHO)
Driver error causes 94 percent of car crashes. Mistakes include a wrong maneuver like a bad pass or a violation of traffic laws like speeding. But the most prevalent reason is driver distraction. (US National Safety Council or NSC)
“Distractions now join alcohol and speeding as leading factors in fatal and serious injury crashes.” (NSC)
What is driver distraction?
To drive safely, we need three abilities:
1. Visual—to see the road without any obstructions
2. Physical—to keep our hands on the steering wheel
3. Cognitive—to keep our attention on the road, which includes auditory.
Once we impair any of the above skills, we become distracted drivers and we risk our safety and those of other motorists and pedestrians.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines distraction as a specific type of inattention that occurs when drivers divert their attention from the driving task to focus on some other activity instead. Distraction as a subset of inattention which includes the driver’s physical condition (fatigued, sleepy, sick) and emotional state (stressed, anxious, bored, furious).
“Anything that takes your attention away from driving can be a distraction. Sending a text message, talking on a cellphone, using a navigation system, and eating while driving are a few examples of distracted driving. Any of these distractions can endanger the driver and others.” (Center for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC)
We all know not to use a phone while driving
In the last decade since the introduction of the smart mobile phone, its use by drivers on the road has increased dramatically. Almost all drivers acknowledge the danger of using a cellphone while driving, yet data in finding a direct link that cellphone use caused a road accident is grossly inadequate, underreported, and hard to collect.
In 2011, WHO estimated 1.4 million crashes from drivers talking on cellphones and about 200,000 crashes from texts or e-mails sent by the driver. This number is now too low given that there are about 5 billion cellphone users in the world.
In a three-month 2017 survey of 3.1 million US motorists by Zendrive, a driving data collector, 88 percent of drivers used their cellphones to talk or text while driving. Cellphone users averaged 3.5 minutes for every hour on the road.
“Using mobile phones can cause drivers to take their eyes off the road, their hands off the steering wheel, and their minds off the road and the surrounding situation. It is this last type of distraction—known as cognitive distraction—which appears to have the biggest impact on driving behavior. Evidence shows that the distraction caused by mobile phones can impair driving performance in a number of ways, e.g. longer reaction times (notably braking reaction time, but also reaction to traffic signals), impaired ability to keep in the correct lane, and shorter following distances.” (WHO)
“Texting while driving is especially dangerous because it combines all three types of distraction.” (CDC)
In the Philippines, its Anti-Distracted Driving Law (RA 10913) only punishes the use of electronic handheld devices while operating a motor vehicle. It does not penalize hands-free mobile use nor the use of any built-in electronic device in the car like the radio or GPS when either still causes driver distraction.
Hands-free is not risk-free
While a hands-free device seems like a solution to driver distraction (since it keeps the driver’s eyes on the road and hands on the wheel) its use is not much safer than handheld mobiles.
Drivers who use handheld or hands-free cellphones while driving are still visually impaired. When we are on the phone, we split our attention span so that we look but we do not see, and we also lose our peripheral vision.
“[D]rivers using cellphones look but fail to see up to 50 percent of the information in their driving environment. Distracted drivers experience what researchers call inattention blindness, similar to that of tunnel vision. Drivers are looking out the windshield, but they do not process everything in the roadway environment that they must know to effectively monitor their surroundings, seek and identify potential hazards, and respond to unexpected situations.” (NSC)
Also, hands-free devices do not eliminate cognitive distraction because holding a conversation takes the driver’s mind off the road.
“Using hands-free phones while driving has been shown to lead to reduced visual monitoring of instruments in the car and the general traffic situation, and negatively impacts on vehicle control. This evidence suggests that hands-free phones are not safer to use than hand-held phones in terms of driving performance.” (WHO)
Further, drivers who hold their cellphones as they drive typically exhibit compensatory driving behavior by slowing down or increasing following distances. But talking on the phone hands-free could make the driver lax.
“Interestingly, some limited evidence suggests that drivers using hands-free phones are less likely to show such compensatory behavior compared to those who drive and use hand-held phones. This may be because the physical presence of a hand-held phone acts as a reminder to the driver of the potential safety threat posed by the use of the phone.” (WHO)
Texting hikes your risk
More dangerous than talking on the phone, is texting while driving, which increases your chance of an accident by eight times because it impairs your manual, visual, and cognitive skills. (Oregon State University)
“The absolute worst is texting on a cell phone, which is a whole group of distractions. With texting, you’re doing something besides driving, thinking about something besides driving, and looking at the wrong thing,” said David Hurwitz, co-author of the Oregon State study.
Hurwitz said that drivers drove more slowly while texting, took their eyes off the road more often, and showed worse lateral control. These result in inattention blindness, slower reaction, and going off lane.
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