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Could Anti-Texting Laws Make Roads More Dangerous?
An anonymous reader writes "A new study has found that various state laws that ban texting while driving might actually make the roads more dangerous. If that seems counterintuitive, it's the laws of unintended consequences at work. The theory is that the laws don't do much to stop people from texting while driving — but instead, leads them to try to hide the activity more. That is, they end up trying to text with the phone held lower down to avoid it being detected. But, of course, that also takes their eyes even further off the road. The study itself looked at texting-related accidents both before and after 4 different states implemented such laws, and also compared them to neighboring states with no such laws. The results suggest the laws certainly don't help and in some cases appeared to make the situation worse. So if the laws don't work, what is a better solution to preventing texting while driving accidents?"
Why do people always immediately go to the restrictive solution? How about speech-to-text instead of forcing a feature disabled...
As it turns out, talking over a phone is more distracting than talking with someone sitting in the car.
There are multiple reasons:
1. Someone in the car with you can and will respond to the dynamically-changing environment as you do. If something unexpected happens, they will usually stop talking.
2. In fact, someone in the car may notice something important, and notify the driver (either by shutting up or pointing it out), thereby partially mitigating the distraction they cause by talking.
3. A phone conversation requires more of your attention because you have to make up for the deficiencies of the data channel (phones have lower audio quality than real life, you can't read their body language (even out of the corner of your eye, you can get a feel for a person's mood), etc.).
4. Shared context makes communication more efficient, thus requiring less mental effort (this is why, even in this day and age, people generally want to meet face-to-face).
5. Studies have shown that it takes humans more mental effort to think/interact with people/data they believe is remote as compared to people/things they think are local. In one study, they measured reaction times and errors in a driving simulator when people were either using an "in-car GPS" giving them instructions or a "satellite data-feed" giving them instructions. Even though both sets of instructions were identical (including latency, etc.), the mere perception that the "satellite data-feed" was non-local caused people to devote more mental effort to it, which increased driving accidents. A non-intuitive result, perhaps, but human mental machinery is finely tuned not for the tasks we currently expect it to perform.
6. Initiating and finishing a phonecall requires much more attention than stopping/starting a conversation with someone sitting beside you. (Unlike fidgeting with a radio, answering a phonecall requires immediate action not at a moment of the driver's choosing.)
People engage in a variety of activities while driving. All of these secondary activities induce distraction and thereby increasing driving risk. There is a valid debate to be had about where to draw the line with respect to distractions. But it is fairly well-established that talking on a phone while driving, and certainly texting while driving, are more dangerous than talking to a passenger while driving. So it may indeed be reasonable and consistent to ban reading books, texting and making phonecalls while driving... but not banning listening to the radio or having conversations with passengers.