Ways to miss the message
Cure for addiction to technology may be more technology
Five years ago, a texting driver plowed through a red light in Halifax, sending Josh Poulain’s younger brother and sister to the hospital.
The two teenagers recovered, but Josh and his father Angus started reading up on the ones who weren’t so lucky. Stories about crashes caused by distracted drivers were everywhere.
Josh and Angus saw a software engineering challenge — and an opportunity.
“This honour system, where we expect you to protect yourself, put your phone away while driving, it doesn’t work,” said Josh, now 26. “Technology created the problem and technology is the only way to solve the problem.”
Today, Josh and his father have a company called Keeping Roads Safe, which makes a product called DriveCare. The device prevents drivers’ mobile phones from displaying calls, texts and social media notifications while their vehicles are turned on, sending an automatic reply to incoming text messages informing the sender the recipient is driving and unable to respond.
After a year and a half of devoting themselves to the business full time, Josh and Angus say DriveCare has been installed in thousands of vehicles, with contracts in the works with major Canadian and U.S. companies who want to keep their drivers’ attention focused on the road. Cellcontrol, an American competitor with a similar product, says vehicles using its device are logging almost 2.5 million protected kilometres each day.
Keeping Roads Safe recently started selling DriveCare through its website, while Cellcontrol recently became available at Canadian Tire for $199.99.
Selling the product to individual drivers is a very different challenge from selling it to bottom-line-focused commercial fleet managers, however. Since the threat of dying isn’t enough to keep people from texting behind the wheel, it probably won’t be enough to convince the worst offenders to buy a product that stops them from doing it.
Kathy Belton, associate director of the University of Alberta’s Injury Prevention Centre, said there’s a lot we can learn from seatbelt advocacy a few decades ago. Making buckling up a social norm took legislation requiring people to wear seatbelts and cars to have them. It also took a shift in attitudes that made wearing a seatbelt something people just do, without thinking twice.
“What we need is a whole shift in the way we think about driving,” Belton said. “We need to have a threat of being caught and we need a penalty that is sufficient.”
Getting there is not going to be easy. The sale of wireless services is growing quickly, and addressing the deadly distractions they pose to drivers does not make the industry money.
That may explain why tech makers have failed to take simple steps that would help drivers resist the temptation to use smartphones in dangerous ways.
Four years ago, New York-based graphic designer Joey Cofone won a design competition for coming up with one of those ideas that make you wonder why no one else had thought of it already: a “Car Mode” that comes as a default setting on every iPhone, allowing drivers to shut off incoming notifications while still using GPS and music apps.
“No one is going to be excited about downloading an app that limits their phone,” Cofone said. “But like Airplane Mode, if it’s baked right into the operating system, there’s a high chance people will start using it.”
The downside of making it a default setting, of course, is that it requires the participation of iPhone maker Apple. Cofone said when he contacted the company about his idea he was met with silence.
“It’s surprising that Apple doesn’t give the users the option to protect themselves,” he said.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Google. Apple and Google’s operating systems power 98% of all smartphones sold worldwide.
Both are busy forging partnerships with automakers to integrate smartphones and cars even further — displaying select apps from their phone’s screen on a large dashboard display.
The idea is to allow drivers to keep their eyes on the road and control their phones without fumbling for them in their laps. However, they will also make distracting texts and calls harder to ignore.
So it might be up to insurance companies to help promote turning off notifications.
Both Cellcontrol and DriveCare are in talks with Canadian insurance providers about offering a discount to vehicle owners who use their devices.
“A teenager is never going to buy this,” said Angus of DriveCare, but maybe the promise of an extra $50 off monthly insurance payments would be an effective incentive.
Vehicles outfitted with sensors that communicate with infrastructure and each other could be a saving grace, too. In the case of the Poulain car, new technology coming on the market would have known, for instance, another vehicle was barrelling through a red light, automatically braking and preventing the collision.
“Technology created the problem and technology is the only way to solve the problem.” — Josh Poulain