The nation's roads have always had their share of ill-trained, inattentive
and inconsiderate drivers. But experts on driver behavior and traffic safety say
that those problems are compounded today by cutbacks in public financing for
driver education, distractions from cellphones, onboard computers and navigation
systems, inadequate law enforcement and a growing volume of traffic on a finite
road system.
Mr. Earwood, a former racecar driver who teaches courses ranging from basic
driving to police pursuit techniques, notes an abundance of flaws, some small,
all meaningful, in everyday American drivers. They do not adjust their mirrors
properly or check them enough. They enter curves too fast and exit them too
slowly. They are unable to maintain a consistent speed and do not understand
basic vehicle dynamics or know how to recover from a skid. And they are not
sufficiently aware of road conditions and the unpredictable behavior of other
motorists.
''The first part is not having the skills,'' Mr. Earwood said. ''The second
is that we're not paying enough attention. Everyone should be driving 12 seconds
ahead of where he is at any given moment, which helps to predict changing
traffic patterns as they occur, rather than after. People drive reactively; they
get nervous, they get tense and start taking it out on other drivers.''
Of course, in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many travelers
drove instead of flew and felt a renewed sense of security being on the ground
and in their cars. In the New York region, an increase in driver courtesy was
reported, and traffic jams appeared to be borne with unusual stoicism.
But road rage, however widely discussed, is not considered a significant
contributor to the accident rate. The chief culprit -- accounting for more than
90 percent of crashes, by the reckoning of the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration -- is driver error.
Safety experts have focused on two major factors in the errors that lead to
highway misadventure -- distraction from a variety of sources and a false belief
that technological improvements in cars prevent accidents or save passengers
from the worst effects.
Recent research has tried to measure the role cellphones and other
distractions in cars play in driver behavior. Two traffic researchers in Spain
last year observed drivers as they tried to simultaneously operate a car and
carry out fairly simple verbal and visual tasks, like repeating letters in the
alphabet or trying to form visual images of numbers or letters.
Their finding was striking: attentiveness to driving, as measured by the
number of times the drivers checked their mirrors or their speedometers, dropped
sharply as drivers tried to perform the mental tasks.
Marcel A. Just, a psychologist and co-director of the Center for Cognitive
Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reached a similar
conclusion in research completed this year. Using magnetic resonance imaging to
measure brain activity, he found that the brain had a limited capacity for
carrying out two tasks at once. Talking on a cellphone while driving, for
example, does not double brain activity, but instead it diminishes the
brainpower for either task.
''Driving is much more cognitively and mentally demanding than people
realize,'' Dr. Just said. ''Even if they just turn on the radio, they are making
a trade-off. They are not getting it for free.''
The telephone, of course, is just one distraction a driver must contend with
as he tries to operate a complex vehicle and anticipate the actions of other
drivers. The modern car is crammed with electronic gizmos that promise
worry-free driving but require drivers to constantly make choices and respond to
new stimuli. These include trip computers and navigation systems; climate
controls; multidisk CD players; rear-seat entertainment systems; and not to
mention the biggest distraction of all, children.
Safety experts have only recently begun to focus on improving the training of
new drivers, with the most significant advance being the imposition of graduated
licensing to address the group of drivers with by far the worst accident rate --
16-year-olds.
Currently, 46 states have instituted graduated licensing policies. There are
variations among the states, but most graduated licensing programs assign a
permit at age 16. Under the permit's conditions, late-night hours are blocked;
there are also limits on transporting passengers, and the teenager must drive
with a responsible adult. Unrestricted driving is not allowed until age 17, when
the highest danger period is past.
While most drivers are certain that roadways have become riskier, statistics
provide good news. The fatality rate on highways measured by deaths per mile
driven is consistently decreasing. While roughly 42,000 Americans die in traffic
accidents each year, the number of vehicles and miles driven have grown steadily
every decade.
This is a source of comfort to some safety experts, who take it as a sign
that Americans are somehow managing the frustrations of highway congestion and
that their vehicles are offering ever-improving margins of safety.
But it is not a source of comfort to Leonard Evans, a former General Motors
safety engineer and the author of the 1991 book ''Traffic Safety and the
Driver.''
Dr. Evans, who is the president of the International Traffic Medicine
Association, contends that so-called safety devices in cars, particularly air
bags, have had an insidious and deadly effect on driver behavior.
He said that as recently as the late 1970's the United States had the safest
highways, using the measure of traffic deaths per 100,000 registered vehicles.
Today, he said, the United States is in 12th place and sinking.
''If the United States had simply matched Canada's performance over that
period,'' Dr. Evans said, ''annual U.S. fatalities this year would be 28,000,
rather than more than 41,000.''
He said that since the mid-60's, Americans have spent billions of dollars
seeking the perfect technological fix to prevent fatalities. Their solutions,
the air bag and other ''passive'' devices, have only compounded the problem.
Other industrial nations, Dr. Evans said, have pursued a more balanced approach
-- better and earlier driver education, stricter enforcement of traffic and
seat-belt laws, use of cameras to detect speeding and red-light running and
campaigns against aggressive driving.
''We have just received the wonderful good news that the air bag is killing
fewer people than it used to,'' he said. ''When was that an advertisement for a
safety device, that it's killing fewer people than it used to?''
''We see Americans collectively driving a couple of miles an hour faster
because of a false sense of safety,'' he said. ''And that collective increase in
speed more than washes away the alleged benefit of air bags.''
While the air bag has not proved to be the silver bullet that some
technologists envisioned, research continues to explore devices that can prevent
accidents or minimize their effects. At the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration in Washington and at a new simulator laboratory in Iowa,
researchers are studying the interaction between driver and machine, seeking to
protect drivers from their own mistakes.
One device monitors the operation of the vehicle and uses sensors to alert
the car and driver to road conditions. By measuring speed differentials, a
computer determines if the vehicle is operating on a crowded freeway, then cuts
off cellphone calls or switches off a navigation system, for example.
In another experiment, G.M. has built 10 test cars with sensors in the front
bumpers that measure the distance to a vehicle in front. If the driver does not
keep a safe distance, the car warns the driver and applies the brakes if he does
not slow down.
''Technology is coming into the vehicle, whether we like it or not,'' said
Joseph Kanianthra, the director of the office of vehicle safety research at the
highway safety agency. ''We're trying to use new technology to minimize the
distractions they cause. Our approach is not to take over control of the vehicle
altogether, but to provide assistance to the driver, give them a timely warning
and maybe even nudge them a bit.''
But Mr. Kanianthra warned that these devices could not replace an attentive
driver. And, he added, ''we must always be aware of unintended consequences.''
''The highways are safer, the cars are safer, but the guys steering them
haven't improved a bit,'' said Terry Earwood, the chief instructor at the Skip
Barber driving and racing schools in Lakeville, Conn.
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