The Fresh York Times
November 15, 2016
The messaging app Snapchat permits motorists to post photos that record the speed of the vehicle. The navigation app Waze prizes drivers with points when they report traffic jams and accidents. Even the game Pokémon Go has drivers searching for virtual creatures on the nation’s highways.
When dispelled driving entered the national consciousness a decade ago, the problem was mainly people who made calls or sent texts from their cellphones. The solution then was to introduce fresh technologies to keep drivers’ forearms on the wheel. Innovations since then — car Wi-Fi and a host of fresh apps — have led to a boom in internet use in vehicles that safety experts say is contributing to a surge in highway deaths.
After stable declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in fifty years. And the numbers so far this year are even worse. In the very first six months of 2016, highway deaths leaped Ten.Four percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, said in an interview.
The Florida Highway Patrol is investigating an Oct. Twenty six crash near Tampa that killed five people. A passenger in one car, a teenager, recorded a Snapchat movie demonstrating her vehicle traveling at one hundred fifteen m.p.h. just before the collision.
A lawsuit filed in a Georgia court claims a teenage driver who was in a September two thousand fifteen crash near Atlanta was using Snapchat while driving more than one hundred m.p.h., according to court records. The car collided with the car of an Uber driver, who was gravely injured.
Alarmed by the statistics, the Department of Transportation in October outlined a plan to work with the National Safety Council and other advocacy groups to devise a “Road to Zero” strategy, with the ambitious objective of eliminating roadway fatalities within thirty years.
The Obama administration’s transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx, said that the near-term effort would involve identifying switches in regulations, laws and standards that could help reduce fatalities. That might include pushing for all states to tighten and enforce laws requiring use of seatbelts in cars and helmets on motorcycles, while cracking down on dissipated or drunken driving. The effort might also include tougher regulation of strong trucks, Mr. Foxx said.
Graphic | Deadly Crashes Rise
A 2nd, related effort would concentrate on setting longer-term goals and speeding the introduction of autonomous-driving technologies that many safety experts say have the potential to prevent accidents by removing dissipated humans from the driving equation.
One concern so far, however, is that current generations of automated driver-assistance systems, like the Autopilot feature suggested by Tesla Motors, may be lulling some drivers into a false sense of security that can contribute to dispersed driving.
Whether highway safety officials in the Trump administration will have the same priorities, however, is too soon to say. The names of candidates for transportation secretary have not yet been publicly floated.
Most fresh vehicles sold today have software that connects to a smartphone and permits drivers to place phone calls, dictate texts and use apps hands-free. Ford Motor has its Sync system, for example. Others, including Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, suggest their own interfaces as well as Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto.
Automakers say these systems enable customers to concentrate on driving even while interacting with their smartphones.
“The entire principle is to bring voice recognition to customers so they can keep their eyes on the road and forearms on the wheel,” said Alan Hall, a spokesman for Ford, which began installing Sync in cars in 2007.
Since then, the company has added features to reduce distractions, like a “do not disturb button” that lets drivers block incoming calls and texts.
CarPlay permits use of the iPhone’s Siri virtual assistant to response phone calls, dictate texts and control apps like Spotify and Pandora. Both Sync and CarPlay present simplified menus on a car’s in-dash display to reduce driver distraction and turn off the phone’s screen, eliminating the temptation to use the device itself.
But Deborah Hersman, president of the nonprofit National Safety Council and a former chairwoman of the federal National Transportation Safety Board, said it was not clear how much those various technologies diminished distraction — or, instead, encouraged people to use even more functions on their phones while driving. And freeing the drivers’ palms does not necessarily clear their goes.
“It’s the cognitive workload on your brain that’s the problem,” Ms. Hersman said.
Technology in some fresh cars is meant to reduce driver distractions or compensate for them.
Dr. William Chandler, a retired neurosurgeon in Ann Arbor, Mich., just bought a two thousand seventeen BMW X5 sport utility vehicle that warns him if he drifts out of his lane on the highway or if a car is in his blind spot. His dearest feature is a heads-up display on the windshield in front of him that projects his speed, the speed limit and navigation information.
“It puts all the directions and turns right there in my field of vision,” he said. “That’s a real safety factor for dispelled driving, because I’m never looking at the map on the screen in the console.”
But fresh cars make up only a petite portion of the two hundred sixty million vehicles on the road in the United States. Digital diversion is tighter to address in older models.
Brett Hudson, 26, a teacher at a charter school in Jackson, Mich., said his iPhone six Plus had become essential to his daily commute in his two thousand two Chevrolet TrailBlazer. He uses Apple Maps for navigation, listens to music via Pandora and gets his dearest Michigan football call-in showcase on iHeart Radio.
To reduce the time he looks at the phone, Mr. Hudson installed an aftermarket Bluetooth system for hands-free phone calls. He mounts the iPhone on a clip affixed to an air vent, enabling him to see the screen while still keeping the road in his field of vision.
Mr. Hudson concedes that the setup is not risk-free.
“I’ve noticed that when I do have to touch the phone,’’ he said, ‘‘my brain becomes so totally focused, even in that brief period of time, and I don’t indeed reminisce what’s happening on the road in those four or five seconds.”
Insurance companies, which closely track auto accidents, are coaxed that the enhancing use of electronic devices while driving is the largest cause of the rise in road fatalities, according to Robert Gordon, a senior vice president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.
“This is a serious public safety concern for the nation,” Mr. Gordon said at a latest conference in Washington held by the National Transportation Safety Board. “We are all attempting to figure out to what extent this is the fresh normal.”