Driving safety: new technology vs. skills

Great Debates
1

Bill Gates wants to put a whole bunch of new technology in cars to make them safer. Perhaps a car could eventually prevent itself from ever crashing:

Link

Why not just train people to be better drivers?

I believe that here in the U.S. our driver certification standards are laughable. Requiring people to be more skillful drivers would have a big impact, and it could happen long before this new technology is available and widespread.

I’m a flight instructor, and I think if we modeled driver certification after some aspects of pilot training, things would measurably improve. People become good pilots partly because they HAVE to in order to pass the test. I don’t think that’s the case with driving - it appears that the tests are pretty cursory.

The debate: How would more stringent training and testing standards improve driving safety compared to new technology?

Secondary question: Could we impose tougher driving certification standards in a practical manner?

2

Good joke.

Blue screen of death takes on new meanings as your automobile’s OS fails when you’re taking a left curve while driving south on the PCH.

No argument there.

But to play Devil’s Advocate,

(1) In a skilled-drivers-only regime, some people are going to lose their driver’s licenses, and that’s an extreme hardship in the US. But OK, from a traffic safety perspective, that’s a good thing. Except for the bigger ped and car mix that results. More ped vs. car.

(2) Though often called a privilege, driving is for most a necessity. You have to drive all the time, under all conditions, in nasty weather, in horrendous traffic, down unsafe or unfamiliar roads, and when you are not in peak condition to drive (tired, distracted, upset, cellphoning, dumb, etc.), or risk losing your job, etc. Is lack of skill the main cause of auto accidents?

I suggest that most people are reasonably skilled, but are unable to maintain the same level of concentration every day, day in and day out, under all conditions, for every single moment of their drive. And that is the principal cause of accidents. Failure to use one’s skill and common sense. Sure, we can train drivers for concentration, attitude, etc., like they do in Pilot Safety courses, and it would help, but how much? We’re tallking about the general population here. Not the awesome video game players who never blink.

So neither new technology nor increased training help much.

The Real Solution? Old technology!

Speed Bumps! Cars that can’t go over 25 mph! (You think that’s too slow? It still beats walking! 10 times as fast! So what if it’s not 20 times as fast!) Cars that can sense speed limits for certain stretches of road could be a new technology.

You really want to decrease injuries and fatalities? --> decrease speed limits!
Link
Link2

Speed limits! Speed bumps! Something no one seems to consider in the two articles above. Traffic calming measures! Pot holes!

(Softer outer bumpers and shells structured to protect pedestrians - that would be a good new technology.)

“New technology” is vague. New technology in cars are cell phones, TV’s, and GPS – all distractors.

Use the existing system. Yearly re-licensing. Different kinds of tests every year. Mandatory drivers’ education, also annually. More focus on obsessive carefulness and attitude. Increased enforcement of standards. More roadside crosses. If you kill someone with your vehicle, you get to maintain the roadside memorial. Assess fault in every driving accident and forbid insurance companies to raise rates if you are not at fault (which they do covertly nowadays).

3

Yearly re-licensing? Nope, no way. Not worth it. Perhaps make someone re-take the test if they get in an accident. That might help weed out some of the bad drivers.

I don’t think you can train someone to be a better driver. You either are or you aren’t.

Safe driving is mostly about the ability to pay attention, and try to predict what another driver will do.

Bad drivers don’t pay attention.

Good drivers plan for and accommodate for it. Good drivers expect that there are bad drivers on the road. A good driver assumes that everyone else is a bad driver.

4

You ever try to train someone who doesn’t care? Not everyone is trainable. Ask anyone who is in IT. Now you’re adding people who don’t care, with technology that people will not care about. I don’t know about this.

"Hi, yes, helpdesk? I need to open up a ticket. I’m on the I-55, and my speedometer is flashing, ‘boot disk not found.’ "

I don’t know, maybe. But I think the difference with flying and driving is that with flying, you want to be good because just the slightest problem may get you killed. Not so much because you’re afraid to pass the test. And it’s important to know your procedures with flying. It’s important with driving too, but people just don’t care, and will accept the risks of their mistakes.

5

So you disagree with the OP’s suggestion that improved training has no effect. I think it helps some drivers become better, so at least for them it is useful. Also some people become more receptive to the message as they get older, hence more argument for re-training. The rest are hopeless. Especially after they spend the afternoon drinking on the river. Look out!

Precisely because good Pilot Training (and the rare good Driver Training) includes training to pay attention, as mentioned previously, it may be useful.

Perhaps the solution is a comination of both training and technology.

First, everyone gets better driving training.

Then in the high tech car, when you talk on your cell phone, a robot arm comes out of the dash, turns the car off, snatches the cell phone and whaps it against your head repeatedly until you flee the car, running out into traffic, where you promptly get hit, thus removing a bad driver from the roads.

6

As I’ve said before (probably inducing nausea in some people if I say it again) my first several cars were sports cars. Before that I bounced around the desert on dirt bikes, which honed my reflexes. While I’m not one of the lucky ones who got my pilot’s certificate on my 16th birthday, I ws still fairly young when I did. The two things that my instructor was most fond of shouting (this is in the early-1980s, before everyone used headsets) were ‘Look outside of the airplane!’ and ‘Fly the airplane!’ Of course there were ‘clearing turns’ before maneuvers. I learned to ‘keep my head on a swivel’ and to practise situational awareness. I think the combination of dirt riding, which offered frequent ‘pop-up’ situations where quick reactions were required, and learning to fly, which polished my situational awareness, and driving sports cars, which require some attention to drive well, all helped to make me a better driver.

In L.A. I saw many people whom I call ‘Left Seat Passengers’ or ‘Left Seat Zombies’. The idea is that they are not actually driving, but that they are merely passengers who happen to have a steering wheel in front of them. I’ve seen a lot of collisions or near-collisions that have been caused by inattentiveness on the parts of LSPs. I was in a collision a few years ago when I was stopped in traffic on the freeway and I was hit by a girl who had just entered the freeway was too involved with adjusting her stereo to notice that traffic was stopped.

Driving is ‘easy enough’ as it is. Automatic transmissions mean that people no longer have to think about energy conservation and how to best use the energy of their powerplants through the gearboxes in normal driving. Stereos allow people to ‘zone out’ while their driving, and divide their attentions. I’m sure others can come up with more examples on ‘new technologies’ (i.e., everything that’s been invented in the last 100+ years) that have made driving easier, more comfortable, safer, etc.

Which is not to say that things that have the potential to distract are bad things. I wouldn’t want to go on a long trip without music, for example. But they can distract drivers who have not been taught situational awareness, and may turn them into Left Seat Passengers.

7

I strongly disagree with each of these assertions.

Everyone of reasonable intelligence and physical ability can be trained to perform tasks such as flying an airplane and driving a car. I’ve been a teacher of many things, and I doubt there is anything I can say with more confidence: Everyone IS trainable.

And yes, I’ve taught many unmotivated people. Although even in that state people can and do learn something, you’re correct that motivation is crucial. I think raising the bar on driver certification could supply some of that motivation.

Driving a car is not a mystical process. Like flying a plane, the skills can be defined and assessed.

I think re-certification every two or five years is certainly do-able, and I’d support that. Pilots have to take instruction every two years unless they’ve acquired a new license or rating in that time. There are sooooo many road accidents each year, I think periodic training is the least we can do to mitigate the problem.

8

Look, there are several orders of magnitude more cars on the road than airplanes in the air. All those cars are driven by people and people make mistakes. No matter how well you train people, there will be accidents. By the OPs logic, we shouldn’t waste money on airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones, roll cages or any othe safety feature.

9

I think the critical point is the one empty filing cabinet makes. The economic and social consequences of not being able to drive are horrendous, unless you happen to live in exactly the right part of a handful of metropolitan areas. (And I do, and even then not having my car available when I’m downtown is no picnic.) If we had a system of such incredibly strict licensing requirements, that impact would be multiplied a thousandfold. That’s not only bad for the folks that can’t get their licenses, it’s bad for the whole economy, which like it or not in this country runs on the auomobile. Business that aren’t easily accessible to public transportation would fail and that would cascade into rising unemployment a decrease in the standard of living. Quite a heavy price to pay.

–Cliffy

10

Yes, and training people better would help prevent some of them. And since so many people drive, small improvements in individuals’ skills could produce significant results.

I’m not opposed to safety devices. I said that training people could have a measurable effect before all this fancy new technology were available and reliable.

Seems to me a combination of both would result in better safety. But we could certainly improve driver training faster than we’ll get crash-proof software into cars. Heck, just make the written test harder for a start - the one in my state is a joke.

11

I don’t believe any of this will help the death rate. The 2004 death rate was a record low. Cite. About one third of those were alcohol related. Fifty-six percent of the people killed weren’t wearing seatbelts. The death rate has dropped every year since they started recording it, even since the ending of the fifty-five mph speed limit, so I doubt very seriously that anyone who drives actually wants the speed limit lowered. Bill Gates just wants to sell his technology to the automakers.

12

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s no reason not to build safer cars while improving driver training.