Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (11 page)

S
heriff's investigators combing the wreckage on the night of February thirteenth in Forsyth County, Georgia, concluded high school senior Taylor Oliver was using his cell phone to send text
messages in the moments before his Ford pickup truck drifted off a county road. When he realized his blunder, Oliver appeared to try to steer back onto the asphalt, but he overcorrected and lost control. His pickup slid sideways across the centerline and into opposing traffic. A “Super Duty” Ford F–350 pickup truck—towing a twenty-four-foot trailer with a Bobcat front-end loader onboard—broadsided the passenger side of Oliver's pickup. Both trucks careened off the roadway and down an embankment. The driver and passenger in the bigger truck were not injured, but Oliver, alone in his Ford, suffered fatal head injuries.

Investigators in Greensboro, North Carolina, theorized that some sort of distraction also sent UPS Store worker Roger McHenry to his death when his car careened into the “gore point” where Interstate 40 splits, and in Flagstaff, Arizona, where the driver of a semitruck hauling a load of beer died when he drove off the road and into a culvert on Interstate 40, closing the westbound side of the freeway for half a day because of spilled beer and debris. And Mandy J. Theurer died on the familiar rural road where she lived, another likely distracted driver, careening into a ditch she had driven by safely countless times before. The twenty-six-year-old cosmetologist who worked at the Cute as a Button salon in Portland, Indiana, did not have her seat belt buckled, and when her car overturned she was ejected, suffering fatal trauma. Fifty percent of all car crashes occur within five miles of home.

Because of the prevalence of such accidents, distracted driving—particularly when it involves using cell phones—has in recent years become the focus of public debate, legislation, police crackdowns . . . and considerable misunderstanding.

The problem is not cell phones per se—it's the human brain and what the National Safety Council calls “the myth of multitasking.”
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This is the common but incorrect belief that humans are good at doing several things at once, whether driving or cooking
or dancing. In most endeavors, this is a harmless belief; but when traveling 65 miles per hour, the stakes are too high to be governed by myth. We're not talking about walking and chewing gum here, but about tasks that require thought and attention. The truth is, no matter how it feels or appears subjectively, the human brain cannot pay attention to two cognitive tasks at the same time. Computers can do this but not humans. We are not built for it.

What the brain is really good at is
toggling
between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously.

This is the essence of distraction and it's not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even
think
they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It's biology.

The U.S. Department of Transportation made a public service video a few years ago featuring a fatal crash in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that illustrates this problem.
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A twenty-year-old
woman, while driving on a city street, spoke by cell phone with someone at the church where she did volunteer work with elementary school–aged children. Witnesses later told police that she was looking straight ahead out the windshield while talking on her phone—not looking down, not texting, not dialing. Yet she drove right through a red light at an intersection into cross traffic. The light had been changed long enough for several cars to move through the intersection right in her field of view, yet she kept going, never braking but speeding into the intersection against the light, where she broadsided another car at 48 miles an hour. A twelve-year-old boy in the car she broadsided was killed in the collision.

The problem isn't that humans can't be good drivers. When focused and fully engaged, humans can be fantastic drivers, capable of displaying the same sort of innate mental calculation of trajectories and safe passage as a star football quarterback and his receiver use to complete a pass forty yards downfield. At the same time, the brain is very good at ignoring false signs of danger—thereby avoiding the constant traffic slowdowns that would result from stopping for every possible hazard—and able to distinguish a person running into traffic from a wayward balloon blowing into the road without a moment's hesitation. That might sound like a no-brainer, but that balloon would give fits to the literal computer brain of a driverless car, which would likely grind to a halt for the balloon as quickly as for a person.

The problem is that staying focused and fully engaged for sustained periods of time is not what humans do best, with or without a cell phone in hand. Driving can be boring, the conditions monotonous, or the street or intersection so familiar that we hardly notice or think about it. That's when the brain's ability to stay focused on safe driving decays, because humans are terrible at doing repetitive, routine tasks while also remaining alert for
sudden, unexpected dangers that may or not materialize. Robots and computers excel in that scenario—which is why autopilots on airliners have become essential tools during long flights.

Using cell phones, employing GPS devices, and engaging in other tasks unrelated to driving (eating, putting on makeup, using an electric razor—almost anything can become a distraction) heighten this risk. And so distracted driving happens every day in America. The results are fatal: about once an hour that we know of.

When danger looms—a car jamming on the brakes in front, a stop signal unnoticed, a curve in the road when attention is diverted—a lot of bad things can happen before a distracted driver can refocus attention and react.

“You put your life in the hands of
everybody
passing you on a two-lane road every day,” Jim McNamara says, and the CHP officer's tone makes clear that he does not enjoy this particular aspect of driving. McNamara knows that trust is violated daily. He's seen it. He's cleaned up after it. It happens so fast and so easily: the physics of four-thousand-pound objects racing toward one another, pitted against the temptation so many drivers indulge, to read that text or find that playlist, because it'll only take a few seconds looking away from the road. The problem: two cars traveling 65 miles per hour in opposite directions have a closing speed of 190 feet per second. All you have to do is look down at your phone and inadvertently drift across the centerline: in just three seconds, two cars that had two football fields' worth of distance between them are in a head-on collision.

“I wish we could impress that on people, the ramifications of looking down at your phone,” McNamara says. “We see it all the time.”

Even when there is time to react, the sudden refocus from a distracted state can lead to overcorrection—a too-vigorous swerve
of the steering wheel or skid-causing jam of the brakes that can make things worse. This, too, happened several times on Friday the thirteenth.

For the police, proving a case of distracted driving is difficult. Unlike drunken driving, which can be verified with blood alcohol testing, or speeding, which can be calculated from traffic cameras, impact force, skid marks, and physical damage, distraction rarely leaves hard evidence and, in the absence of witnesses, can be inferred though seldom proved.
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But now an unusual and sobering analysis of 1,700 videos of teen drivers taken from in-car recordings of crashes suggests distracted driving may be a much larger problem than previously believed. Two particular types of crashes stood out: 89 percent of road-departure crashes—in which cars drifted onto shoulders or off roadbeds entriely—and 76 percent of rear-end collisions were caused by distraction.

The videos are horrifying, one crash after another in which death or major injury was avoided by luck rather than skill: teens staring down at cell phones for four seconds, applying makeup, staring out the side windows—all while their cars veered off the road, slammed into the back of other cars, or spun out as the drivers looked up and overreacted. The seven most common distractions observed in this video study played out this way:

The study, released in March 2015 by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety, found that distraction was a factor in nearly six out of ten moderate to severe crashes involving teen drivers.
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K
ids who drive to Lincoln-Way Central High School in the Chicago suburb of New Lenox every day would do almost anything to avoid the $125 annual parking fee for a spot in the school lot. The preferred method to beat this bill is to park on the far side of US Highway 30, which the school campus sits astride. The drawback of that free parking is the need to brave a busy four-lane thoroughfare at rush hour in order to get to class. Students can start to cross, then find themselves stranded on the concrete median separating the eastbound and westbound lanes, forced to wait for traffic to ease. So it was with seventeen-year-old Dylan Wischover of Manhattan, Illinois. Whether he tripped, slipped, or simply misjudged when to cross, the junior stepped off the median and into the path of a westbound semitruck. The trucker had no chance to brake before striking and killing Dylan. Grief counselors were summoned to the school to help distraught students, while at home his parents had to face their son's room, filled with boxes of pickup truck parts he and his father had planned to use that weekend in Dylan's favorite pastime: fixing up old vehicles.

Among his final Twitter posts the day before he died, one was wryly humorous, the other darkly poignant: “The only 4.0 I'm getting this semester is when girls rate me out of 10,” he wrote, followed by the post, “Ride or die.”

The uneasy mix of pedestrians and vehicles played out with
terrible consequences many times on this particular Friday the thirteenth. A seventy-year-old finance professor at the University of Arizona, out for a stroll at 5:00 p.m. along the shoulder of Tucson's aptly named Speedway Boulevard, was struck from behind by a car coming around a bend in the road. Sharon Garrison, whose online tributes included praise from students, colleagues, and business leaders she previously taught during a long career, died the next day of her injuries. The driver stopped immediately and cooperated with police, and no citations were issued. Under Arizona laws that generally favor drivers over walkers, pedestrians on shoulders of roads where no sidewalks are present are supposed to walk
facing
traffic, presumably so they can avoid approaching vehicles rather than vice versa.

An hour later, in Desert Hot Springs, California, Edward Manning, a forty-four-year-old father of four, was struck and killed by a passing car on the same route he walked every day to and from home—a residential avenue in this resort town notorious for poor lighting, lack of crosswalks, and drivers who routinely exceed the forty-mile-per-hour limit. A city official conceded in a press interview that lighting and speeding were regional problems that needed to be addressed, but opined that, with scant public money available for improvements, pedestrians needed to be more wary. A few hours after that fatal encounter, a fifty-four-year-old Alabama woman was struck and killed by a GMC Yukon sport-utility vehicle as she took an early-evening walk down a road in the border town of Donna, Texas.

The exact time Tony Ulloa was mowed down in New Braunfels, Texas, by a hit-and-run driver is unknown. The person who rammed into the sixty-five-year-old retired factory worker didn't stop and didn't leave behind much in the way of evidence except for a broken man lying in the road, groaning and bleeding. Ulloa had just taken up jogging to stay fit in his retirement.
He had nearly completed his usual course, which had taken him down the frontage road next to Interstate 35, just five minutes from his home. How much time passed after the hit-and-run driver fled, and what chance of survival he might have had with immediate care, are questions that plague the members of his large family—who say they are most haunted by the knowledge that he died alone when his whole family was so close by.

Overall, sixteen pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles every day in America. Another 466 are injured daily.
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Only a third of the deaths and injuries are even arguably the pedestrians' fault: in 2013, 20 percent occurred from pedestrians running into the street, 7 percent involved improper crossing of the walkway, and 6 percent were from pedestrians standing, lying, playing, or working in the street. The majority are more like the collision that claimed Edward Manning's and Tony Uloa's lives, unintended but nonetheless the result of driver carelessness, indifference, or worse—as avoidable as they are commonplace.