NEW YORK TIMES October 10, 2001, Wednesday

HOW WE DRIVE; Roads Are Safer; Cars Are Safer. Drivers? Forget It.


By JOHN M. BRODER

ISOLATED in 12-speaker, 220-horsepower cocoons, lulled by air bags, all-wheel drive and anti-lock brakes, frustrated by traffic and as impatient as 4-year-olds, American motorists are making driving in America a distasteful ordeal.

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.


''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.

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.''



Organizations mentioned in this article:
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Related Terms:
Roads and Traffic; Accidents and Safety; Drivers Education


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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company