Aid to put phones away while driving
Parents are turning to apps to try and curb distracted teen drivers.
Marty Williams recalls the conversations he and his wife would have with their two daughters about the dangers of talking and texting while driving.
‘‘It’s always a concern,’’ said Williams. ‘‘We just drilled it into their heads over and over until they said ‘ OK, we get it,’ and when we saw something [about the dangers of drivers texting] on TV, we made sure they saw it, too.’’
Parents like Williams have reason to worry.
Half of teens say they talk on a cellphone while driving, a third say they swap text messages, and almost half say they’ve been a passenger in a vehicle with a teen driver whose phone use put them at risk, according to statistics.
Teen drivers are more likely to get into a fatal crash than anyone under the age of 80, in part because their brains are still developing the system that evaluates risk.
These days, however, there’s an app for that, several of them, in fact. There are apps that prevent mobile-device use while driving, and some of them alert parents or employers when a user tries to beat the system. They’ve emerged on the market as alarm grows over the carnage caused by distracted driving.
Among all drivers involved in fatal crashes, teens were the most likely to have been distracted, National Highway
good Traffic Administration data show.
‘‘They feel invincible,’’ said Jurek Grabowski, director of research at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
‘‘They have large social networks and they want to stay in contact with them.’’
Conversations on the go, texting, surfing the internet and taking selfies are such a habit among teens that studies show they underestimate the risk.
‘‘We need to almost turn this thing into a brick,’’ David Coleman said recently, holding up his cellphone. ‘‘It can’t just be about texting. It has to be about email, Facebook and no inappropriate calls.’’
Coleman is marketing director for Cellcontrol, one of several companies competing for the chance to shut down people’s mobile devices while they’re driving. Most of the companies that sell cellphone service also provide apps that can limit access.
Many of the apps are triggered when a GPS sensor detects that a vehicle is in motion, and some will alert parents or employers when the app has been turned off or disabled. Independent experts consider that a feature buyers should look for.
‘‘Especially for younger drivers. As clever as you can be, they will be more clever,’’ said Leo McCloskey, a tech guru for the Intelligent Transportation Society.
‘‘The best way to do it is to integrate the device with the vehicle so that you could have more fine-grained control.’’
That fine-grained control means that parents or employers can select the features they want to allow their drivers to use and block those that worry them.
‘‘It’s important to have a solid oversight function so that use can be monitored by a fleet manager or parent,’’ said Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
‘‘Cellcontrol is one of the better, most complete systems. TeensSafer is another one that we’ve looked at that works pretty well,’’ he said.
‘‘These products are going to be the most useful for fleet operators and for parents trying to control phone use by their driving teens. Both Cellcontrol and TeenSafer will report attempts to tamper with or override the system.’’
Businesses that send fleets of cars, vans or trucks onto the streets have shown increasing interest in those products, as juries have issued multimillion-dollar rewards to those injured or killed by distracted drivers who were on the job.
Cellcontrol provides two options for connecting to a vehicle. One is a device the size of an electronic toll transponder that is glued to the windshield with the same adhesive material used to secure rearview mirrors. The more sophisticated choice plugs in to a vehicle’s diagnostic computer port. The system works with iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile.
The system involves an app that is downloaded to the phone of the driver – teenager or employee. The key to the system is software that can be installed on a home computer, tablet or mobile device that allows an authorised person – parent or boss – to customise what the driver is permitted to do, and to monitor compliance.
‘‘We’re not blocking the signal, we’re allowing a protective policy to be brought into the device,’’ he said. ‘‘The administrator has the option to make the policy as restrictive as possible, or not.’’
For example, phone use could be restricted to a hands-free device. Or calls could be restricted to an emergency number or a parent or office.
Or parents could attempt to mandate that all passengers in the car driven by their teenager download the app.
‘‘You could decide this is the kids’ car and we don’t want knuckleheads sitting in the passenger’s seat showing the driver YouTube videos,’’ Coleman said.
Although he is concerned about distracted driving, McCloskey thinks it is a relatively short-term problem.
‘‘The irony, frankly, is that in the medium to long term, as autonomous vehicles really start making a mark, all this goes away as a concern,’’ he said.