Somehow drivers must learn to resist the smartphone itch
|
Version 0 of 1. “One of the best drives of my life,” Jeremy Clarkson tweeted last week from Australia. “Gravel road. M6. Sun going down. iPod playing Blind Faith. Beer in cup holder.’” It was the beer that upset people, but on reflection perhaps the use of Twitter is nearly as worrying. For while there’s absolutely no evidence Clarkson consumed either of these intoxicating substances while actually on the move, for millions of other drivers the lines are getting dangerously blurred. Humans are easily bored creatures, which is why the most dangerous thing about any car is the muppet driving it – or more accurately half driving it and half shouting at squabbling children, or changing radio stations, or worrying about work, or applying mascara, or shaving at the wheel (and yes, one intrepid driver was caught by police doing just that last year). But none of these distractions compare, in intensity and addictiveness, to the one increasingly sapping our attention at the wheel: smartphones. Texting while driving kills more American teenagers than drink-driving does. That’s not to downplay the sheer selfish idiocy of drunk drivers but merely to clarify the risk from phones: the average texter takes their eye off the road for less than five seconds but at 55mph, that’s like driving the length of a football field blindfold. Everyone knows it’s wrong but almost half of us admit having used a phone illegally in the car, according to the AA, and increasingly it’s not just to talk but to text or tweet or post one of the endless bragging #drivingselfies cluttering Instagram. (One in three Britons under 24 admitted snapping away while at the wheel in a recent survey for Ford). The latest stupidly dangerous trend is for making Vines, or short video clips, while driving; last month it emerged that a 23-year-old had filmed himself being chased by the police at 60mph through Burnley, ending with the prophetic words: “I’m going to prison now.” The obvious solution is just for everyone to grow up and realise that nobody died of not constantly checking Facebook but that people do regularly die of being driven into. Yet it’s not just teenagers who somehow don’t grasp the lunacy of behaving at the wheel as they would anywhere else. Glancing into the car cutting me up at a roundabout the other day, I was surprised to see the middle-aged driver balancing a tablet on his knee. It’s not just an Englishman’s home but his car that is his castle, judging by the sense of entitlement many feel about doing as they damn well please in it. Add to this sense of private fiefdom the compulsive nature of social media – the itch to share every aspect of our lives as they happen, which means grown adults can’t seemingly stop fiddling with their phones in the middle of real-life conversations or dinner or even sex – and the sneaky scanning of emails at traffic lights becomes almost inevitable. Public education has a role here, of course. But nothing works like getting caught, and there aren’t enough police to stop everyone. So what if your car could stop you instead? A handful of high-end luxury cars already offer optional driver alert systems, involving dashboard cameras that monitor your face; an alarm sounds if you take your eyes off the road for too long, whether to check your phone or simply because you’re nodding off. Toyota, Saab, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and others have developed similar gizmos and, as costs fall, it’s likely they will be offered on more mass-market cars, where perhaps they’ll prod some consciences. But if you’re insouciant enough to Facebook in the fast lane, how likely is an alarm to stop you? How long before you treat your car’s warnings with the same cheery indifference as I treat mine when it pings to tell me that it’s freezing outside or that it has detected the weight of a passenger not wearing their seatbelt? It’s never a passenger; it’s my overstuffed handbag dumped on the seat. But since the car can’t tell the difference it exists, like Daily Mail readers, in a constant froth of panic over nothing; and I have got too used to ignoring it. Technological fixes to technological problems are ultimately only as good as their arrogant users – unless, that is, we’re willing to take the plunge into driverless cars, or ones that can briefly drive themselves if they decide their human has stopped concentrating. Which raises interesting questions about the data from those dashboard cameras. Manufacturers argue that they’re not like aeroplane black boxes: they’re there to help drivers rather than incriminate them, and so don’t routinely store data. But how long before someone starts lobbying for them to do so? The police can already check mobile records to establish whether a driver was calling or texting just before a crash. How useful to know if you were lighting a fag, or fossicking in the glove box for a CD at the crucial moment. As humans find new ways of recording their own stupidity and police resources shrink, the pressure for corporates to police on the state’s behalf may grow. Still, let’s assume no manufacturer wants to install universal spies in the cab, any more than Google wants to snoop on its customers to save GCHQ the trouble – if only because so few of us would buy such a car. That leaves us with the phone companies. Apple is experimenting with a phone that senses movement and blocks messaging when it thinks you’re driving. Another possible solution is jamming signals in cars so that it’s impossible to use phones in them, despite the guaranteed backseat rage from surly teenagers whose devices won’t work either. Some even think the answer could be voice-activated wearables like Google Glass that allow you to shout commands instead of typing – except that last week researchers at the University of California suggested wearing Google Glass while driving might be a bad idea if it reduces peripheral vision. Which leaves the unpalatable fact that tackling deaths from texting while driving ultimately means tackling drivers; and that if we can’t or won’t change the way we behave then it may mean accepting something – an unconscionable invasion of privacy at one extreme, or a rather nannyish enforced break from constant connectedness at the other – that many drivers will hate. The truth, however, is that right now we are bringing it squarely on ourselves. |