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# Driven to Distraction
May 20 2024
Written by Liz Amsden.
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ACCORDING TO LIZ - It’s a good thing that education levels reached new peaks in the years following the Second World War because most new cars on the market today require a PhD to understand them and a bevy of service providers to keep them running.
These cars were designed specifically to make driving easier and protect occupants if – heaven forbid – there’s an accident.
But, in taking away a driver’s autonomy and their engagement in the driving process, are these vehicles laying the ground for future disasters?
Are the smiling faces on the AARP Safety Training website playing to one side of the crowd and leaving the rest of us out?
New tech can be more of a distraction. And as people’s faculties slow down, the frenetic proliferation of doodads designed to help only contributes to the confusion. It’s not that individual assists aren’t welcome, it’s how many there are and how the demands on our attention keep multiplying.
When a situation arises, is it simpler and safer to flip through a bevy of new and confusing directions, or rely on the tried and true?
If you have years of trained muscle-memory responses to emergency situations, even if they might be a bit slower, aren’t they better than the acute anxiety of having to make a decision based on multiple inputs? From visual and verbal cues to having control of your car taken away from you by the computer-on-board?
Yes, the computer may make a choice based on its programming but who’s to say that the driver’s way would be any worse.
What we do know is that verbal instructions from a mechanism and voice-activated systems work for some people, but for others they just induce panic. And therefore, are even less likely to be effective under stress.
We do know that cruise control leads to decreased attention.
We do know that the more complicated the system, the more they cost, and the more they cost to maintain. And without constant maintenance, all this complexity means interrelated problems.
We do know that alerts distract, and that continual alerts diminish response – remember the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”?
We do know that some tech doesn’t work in all situations – or can make problems worse. Someone trained to pump brakes on ice can lose steering control in an ABS vehicle. And it’s supremely frightening when brakes don’t work or won’t allow a driver to steer away from dangerous collision points or roadside drop-offs that the brakes cannot see.
Different sign protocols in different states are confusing. And potentially dangerous.
Changing yield signs from yellow triangles to red-bordered white ones does not enhance road safety.
Assuming all drivers know that a yellow pennant – who knew? – indicates a no passing zone without specific direction is a recipe for disaster, a clear and present threat for workers and children and oncoming drivers who may think they are protected.
For some, GPS can be an added distraction as much or even more so than hands-free devices for talking and texting.
Every gadget grabbing for attention is just one more impediment to a driver’s ability to concentrate on their primary task. Radios, cellphones, warning buzzers, flickering dashboard lights, GPS instructions, shifting screen images of what’s ahead and what’s behind, passengers talking, kids squabbling...
And that list doesn’t include what’s outside the car – people speeding or stopped in lanes, overladen semis swaying, strobing lights and sirens of emergency vehicles, children dashing out from between parked cars, abandoned animals and disturbed humans wandering through lanes of traffic...
Within this new and ever-accelerating world, we need to focus on improving driving skills that people already have, not replacing them with an over-inflated reliance on technology.
We need to separate good tech from the not-so-good. We need to understand that all people are not created equal and provide them with a range of options from which they can choose, ones that cater to their strengths and don’t exacerbate their weaknesses.
We know that every person learns differently – by watching, by doing, by physically feeling, by reading, by reasoning, and every possible combination thereof – and all instruction must include all of these styles to effectively reach all people.
We know that learning retention, physical abilities, situational awareness, coherent interpretation and rapid response to fluid challenges vary as people develop from teen to nonagenarian.
GPS audio instructing people who have difficulty telling left from right or estimating distance, to “Turn left in fifty feet” creates anxiety not safety. Even if they have aides-memoire to figure it out, those few seconds could mean the difference between life and death.
Even if you don’t adhere to the conspiracy theories behind V-to-V communication, when your vehicle communicates with other so-enabled vehicles nearby, machinery is only as capable as the programmers imagined and cannot anticipate all eventualities. For parsing the complexities of a situation and finding the out-of-the-box solutions of which the human mind is capable.
Some may think me a Luddite, but embracing change just for the sake of change is a red flag, a clarion call to re-evaluate safety for the greatest number over the blandishments of cutting-edge profiteering.
Giving cars more control is not the solution; empowering drivers to more easily use enhanced tools building on existing experience, is.
Encouraging ongoing assessment and growth along the path is an asset. Lifelong learning is symptomatic of growth, of flourishing, of living life to ones’ fullest potential. Because, ultimately, when people stop learning is when they start to die.
And the more types of instruction for young people of all ages, the better the chance to save a life.
Who knows? It could be your own.
*(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)*
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