Can using tech while driving ever be safe?
New figures from the US reinforce what everyone’s been saying: using your phone while behind the wheel is deadly stupid. APC’s editor weighs in.
Arecent New York Times article (see tinyurl.com/ apc436-drive) puts the blame squarely on distracting apps like Snapchat for a spike in US road deaths over the past two years. And while no similar study has (yet) been conducted in Australia, road fatalities do seem to have been on the rise over the last two years here, too. After a dip through 2013 and 2014, they’ve slowly been creeping up again through 2015 and 2016. At the time of print, the most-recent figures, for October 2016, showed that fatalities were 10.6% higher than average for the same month, calculated using data from the last five years.
Now, alcohol and fatigue are still undeniably the two biggest killers on our roads, but most Australian states recognise the danger smart devices present and, in the last couple of years, have passed laws specifically prohibiting use of phones unless they’re secured in a cradle/holder. And it often goes a bit further than that.
Victoria and NSW, for example, both have wording that state that the only legal actions you can perform on your phone are voice calls, music playback and navigation. And the former two uses require hands-free interaction, with the Victorian laws stating that the condition of use is that your phone “can be operated by the driver without touching any part of the phone, and the phone is not resting on any part of the driver’s body.”
Our digital devices demand our attention in a very exclusive way. A lot of the problem is biological — so don’t feel personally affronted by this fact. While humans are excellent at zooming in and paying attention to a single task or object, we’re not actually very good at monitoring multiple things at the same time — the ubiquitous ‘invisible gorilla’ video (see www.theinvisiblegorilla.com) should pretty clearly demonstrate to anyone who’s tried it that, well, we kind of suck at dividing our focus. Anything that takes your attention off the road is, therefore, a potential hazard.
In practical terms, then, the best advice is the same as it’s always been — it’s best not use your device at all, and if you must use your phone, do so sparingly and with specific hands-free, car-optimised apps. Resist the temptation to read and reply to text messages — even if you’re dictating replies via a digital assistant (like Siri or Google Assistant), that’s still stealing enough of your focus to be dangerous.
And even if your eyes are taken away from the road for just a few seconds, that’s all it takes for the worst to happen. So be smart: don’t use your smartphone when you’re behind the wheel.