This post is, to quote Marisa Tomei, “dead-on-bawls accurate.” Situational awareness is related to, and generated by, a practice airplane pilots call “scan.” Scan, in this context at least, refers to the practice of deliberately cycling through your instruments (dashboard), the environment outside your vehicle, the positions and motions of other vehicles and anything they might have indicated by signal, and forming predictions about what’s going to happen next. Pilots cultivate the habit of good scan, and one sign of a good pilot is that when his scan starts to “break down” (such as realizing he’s been paying too much attention to his instruments and not enough to what’s outside the vehicle), he knows he’s in trouble and ideally turns over the controls to someone fresh or seeks to land safely as soon as possible.
Quick Googling has produced what seems to be a useful discussion of this topic here (warning: .pdf)
If you haven’t been looking up, you haven’t been maintaining your scan, and you don’t have a history of what just happened to help project what’s about to happen. Your situational awareness is compromised, and you’re rebuilding it from scratch as you start to roll forward.
It’s not a safe practice. It might not be an immediately deadly practice, but it’s not especially safe, and that’s not a matter of personal opinion.
edit: I note that one of the dangers discussed in the .pdf is “Data masked by other tasks/attention-catching stimuli.” Like playing games, presumably.
It can…for people prone to sneezing fits, multiple consecutive sneezes can, in fact, take enough time and involve enough involuntary muscle motion or simply take the person’s attention off the road long enough to become dangerous. Someone’s foot can jerk off the brakes, and despite your “I can put my foot back in a second or two” claim, that second or two is several tenths of a second longer than it would take to…even slowly… push a pedestrian into cross-traffic, roll over someone’s foot, clip a cyclist or bump into the car in front of you.
“Oh, but I don’t sneeze like that!” you say. Fine, congrats, you don’t. But have the sense to acknowledge that it can and does happen. Involuntary muscle movements are involuntary…you cannot control them. Perhaps you’ve been lucky so far, in that you’ve never had your foot slip. You cannot guarantee that it won’t ever happen. Taking away what little control of the vehicle you have - removing your hands from the steering wheel and looking away from the road in order to read - means that if something like this were to happen, you have even less chance of correcting for or otherwise reacting in the safest manner possible.
You need to be in control of your vehicle as much as possible, at all times, even at a red light.
How many of those things do you have control over? Only your car. If you aren’t aware of what’s around you, and you aren’t in control of your car (your hands are on a magazine and not the steering wheel) then you cannot effect any control of the situation whatsoever. You’ve removed the one piece of input you could have.
Multi-car pile-ups can and do happen. Pushing a lead car into traffic, pushing a pedestrian can and does happen. If you are aware that there is a pedestrian near you, if your car suddenly gets rammed, you may instinctively turn the wheel to avoid going too far into the intersection, to avoid a pedestrian, to avoid a cyclist assuming you were aware of them in the first place.
You are assuming that you’ll either never get hit or that you would have no choice but to just let events take over, rather than react by turning the wheel, hitting the gas, adding force to the brakes (you don’t think getting hit from behind could cause your foot to slip off?). You are wrong in that assumption.
No, it could harm someone else if you are not alert enough to have a reflexive response that could prevent someone else harm.
Your car slowly bumping a pedestrian or clipping a cyclist might not really cause damage; you might not break their legs or whatever. What you might do is shove them into oncoming traffic so that they get run over by a garbage truck. It’s not only about your car. It’s about what your car could do if events cause you to lose some control of it.
Why do you think that is? Because your thumbs are moving? With both video games and books your eyes are focused on a small, close object, your mind is focused on information coming from that object and not from a broader, peripheral source like when you are driving/staying attentive at a light. Shifting your attention from a game or a book to the road is essentially the same; your brain has to adjust the way it is processing information and their is a delay - even if it’s very short - to do that.
Reading a book or magazine is just as dangerous as playing videogames while driving.
I think the point is that if during your distracted time a small person or animal has found its way into a no visibility position in front of your car - it is too late to be more attentive. Unless you can see through you car you just can’t know.
Perhaps you have some amazing ability the rest of us do not have to enable you to focus adequately on reading and your great surroundings at the same time - but perceptually to the rest of the world it looks really really bad. You might just as well be ripping off a blindfold each time you start up from an intersection.
I don’t cross a street unless I can confirm that the leading car has seen me. To do otherwise it is a roll of the dice with your life. At least consider that if you’re the lead car at an intersection you have a social responsiblity to do this.
Worse is when people do not use the crosswalk and proceed to walk slowly at their leisure, because they know drivers will stop as a courtesy and nobody wants to have a messy situation on their hands. You think: “get over yourself and just proceed :rolleyes:”.
If someone is coming up behind me and I can tell they won’t have enough time to stop (it has happened twice to me), I’m entering the crosswalk if its clear. I certainly won’t cause an accident to prevent one, but I’m positive I won’t sit there and simply brace for impact (in my case, I avoided one accident just like this, but unfortunately I couldn’t do anything about the other).
If you aren’t pulled over to the side of the road, away from the lanes designated for moving traffic, at the very least, then you are driving. A red light is a brief pause in motion, but you’re still operating the vehicle. Even with our lax drivers license requirements in the US, you wouldn’t pass any drivers test in the 50 states by reading while stopped in an open-road test.
Keeping realistic, that’s not to say it isn’t low risk or that people don’t do it, but I wouldn’t try to justify it by playing semantics.
Sounds extremely ignorant. I wouldn’t take my chances pulling stunts like that, as it’s a great way for the driver (or the one behind him), to pull out and go for it, while you perform your antics. If you get clipped or hit, it’s you who will be living with the possible injury.
Like you said, it is a small risk, I would even say its tiny. I’m not driving around areas constantly with pets, small children, and balls bouncing into the street. I have about an average awareness of where I’m driving. In residential zones, I get nervous because children may come running out into the street to chase a ball. I slow near schools, I slow when there are a lot of people milling about in the street in front of a church or school or yard sale. I read, but not at stop signs, and there are little red lights in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I do most of my car reading on big boulevards in commercial or industrial zones, where streets are 2 or 3 lanes wide and pedestrians are few because that is how I get to work
In their case, they’d be wrong. I haven’t done any of that, nor have I been close. You probably think you’re a safe driver too, does that make the comparison apt? I know I am a safe driver because I only read at red lights
Maybe its just me, but I believe such things are rare and not really worth considering all the time. Its like if I get struck by lightning while under a tree, I’m not going to avoid trees for the rest of my life. Its rare and it happens. I may avoid trees for months or a year afterwards, just like I used my seat belt for a year after I got pulled over for it, but eventually it becomes a distant memory. I almost got ran over by a car backing out of a parking space and now I’m very aware of walking in parking lots, but that was a few years ago and most people look first, so I’ve been walking like normal behind cars in parking lots recently. Many times I’m reading as I’m walking, so I’m distracted as well. But I wouldn’t go glaring at everyone or not moving past people until they see me. For the guy who knocked on my car, if I were him, I probably would have just ignored me and walked past. I believe that would be the right thing to do
I feel bad for crossing the crosswalk. Not super bad, since it was a minor offense, but as such I believe it warranted a minor retort. Glaring at me would have been fine. Knocking on my car was a bit much
No, that’s wrong. I have said plenty of times that I feel bad for crossing the crosswalk and acknowledge my mistake in that. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, nor was I inattentive. I was trying to make a yellow that I realized I couldn’t. Could happen to anyone, even good drivers
I don’t know if we really touched on speeding much in this topic, I think I mentioned it in response to someone, but no, general speeding is not an issue. If you’re 30 over the limit, then yes, but not the kind of everyday speeding that I’m sure all of us do
And no, seatbelts are my own problem. That’s nobody’s business but my own. It is an absolutely idiotic law. And even if it was a problem, its not a safety issue for anyone except me. The problem most people have is if people get hurt and don’t have insurance and have to be taken care of with public money. Otherwise, whether or not I use a seatbelt affects only my safety and no one else’s
That’s not exactly the intention but sure, why not? If I were more dangerous, you’d be more pissed right? So why shouldn’t you be less pissed if I was less dangerous? I didn’t bring up the eating and gaming as a defense, only as an example of the disproportionate anger coming out of people in this topic. People are way too angry about something relatively harmless
No, I totally understand. I don’t defend the game thing, I’m not going to say that’s safe at all. But the reading is different, that’s not especially dangerous
This applies not only to me but to you and everyone as well. You are just as capable of having an involuntary sneezing or coughing fit as me, but you would probably say that the chances of that is remote. So are the chances for me taking my foot off the brakes. And the sneezing thing I brought up only as a defense of the supposed dangers of distractions, that it is minor and can happen to anyone so its pointless to be so hypervigilant about it. The chances of me having a sneezing fit and running someone over is probably just as much as me taking my foot off the brakes while engrossed in the latest article on the geopolitical ramifications of Norway’s butter shortage. If you’re so concerned about involuntary muscle moving, what are you personally doing to prevent sneezing-induced car accidents? Nothing, which is exactly what I’m doing, because its insignificant
If a car is bearing down on me, pedestrians are the last thing I’d be thinking of. Even if I wasn’t reading and aware of them, my first priority would be to get me into safety, not him. Reflexively, I think that’s what most people would do and I wouldn’t fault the man who ran over someone when a semi-truck’s bearing down on them and they had a second to react. Maybe you’re more altruistic than I am, but my concern at that point wouldn’t be for anyone’s safety but my own.
And yes, multi-car pileups do happen, but for the most part, they happen on highways at high speeds, not on commercial road intersections where someone plows into a bunch of stopped cars. There are probably significantly more accidents from cars running red lights and hitting a crossing car than there are accidents where people hit cars parked at a red. If I believed at all that there was a significant danger, I wouldn’t be reading, but I don’t think there is such a degree of danger
The chances of that are insignificant.
Because I’m much more engrossed in a game than a magazine. Because when I’m playing a game, I actively try to block out everything else. That’s different with a magazine, whether you want to believe it or not. To use an extreme example to illustrate the point, its like people in this topic saying its ok to check a GPS really quick, or glance at directions, but probably not ok to be trying to juggle flaming oranges. Both are distractions, but one is a lot more, and one is ok while the other is not. I know my gaming is not ok, and I’ve severely curbed that behavior. That doesn’t mean reading a magazine presents remotely the same amount of danger
Well like I said, I was trying to make a yellow light but couldn’t. I’ve acknowledged that mistake.
I disagree that its anything at all like ripping off a blindfold. Do you stare ahead and around you at every intersection you are in? Sometimes you just look ahead, or listen to the music and zone out, or whatever. Don’t tell me that’s any more unsafe. When I’m reading, I may not have a perfect awareness of my surroundings, but that’s not required. I have a general awareness and that’s good enough.
Maybe this will help sum up my attitude towards this whole reading thing:
We have an obligation to be safe, but there is a point where you can say you’re safe enough. You can be a little more safe, but it will cost significantly more effort or capital than what is warranted.
For example, I’m not sure what its called, but there’s a general governmental index of the worth of a human life. I believe its around $6 million. What that measures is the amount of money it would take to save 1 life. Let’s say you’re inspecting groundwater for arsenic, and every year X amount of people die from trace amounts of arsenic in water. Well, you can spend $6 million and cut that number down to X-1. Would you? Would you spend $10 million, up the inspections, increase water purification, and build treatment plants? At a certain point, its just not worth it.
Now of course, if you are, or know the X persons dying, all of this will be little comfort. But we’re living in a society so you have to acknowledge that spending countless amounts of money to save just 1 more life isn’t worth it. Maybe that $6 million can be put into helping the poor, or education, so that in the future less lives will be lost through poverty or the uneducated.
Now going back to my reading, there is a certain point where I am fully aware and want to be safe to. I use turn signals, try not to cut people off, etc. That gets me to a point I call “Safe enough”. There’s a ton of other things I can do to be a little bit safer: take defensive driving courses, concentrate on my driving, not listen to CDs or talk radio, etc. But that presents a much higher cost to me and I feel is simply not worth it. I drive safe enough. That’s it. I don’t need to be a little bit safer by not reading, or not listening to music. I’m safe enough.
The only thing people may have a legitimate complaint about is saying that not reading isn’t a significant infringement on my personal happiness. To them I would counter that I spend hours in the car a week, hours that are going to waste. If you add it up, it most certainly does become significant. I will use that time as I see fit, and if I’m 98% safe instead of 99%, well that’s safe enough
Seriously, dude. Audiobooks. I listen to them all the time! You can get them from the library! And you don’t have to read them in 30-second bursts while you’re stopped at a red light. (Which is behavior that I am having trouble believing you have spent this much time, energy, and text defending.)
When sitting at an intersection I don’t stare ahead, I look around and pay attention to what people are doing. It’s just good driving.
• That couple looks like they are going to cross, no wait, someone just came up and started talking to them. Hard to say what they might do, but they don’t seem to be paying attention.
• There is a bicyclist splitting lanes coming up behind me, I’ll need to pay special attention to him.
• That semi is moving pretty fast, he will certainly run a yellow, maybe a red.
• That fellow that just pulled up across from me does not have his signal on but looks like he is going to turn. Hard to say.
All of this would be missed while you where reading. And it can’t be gleaned by just a quick glance before you take off. If you take the time to really take in your surroundings after reading, you are holding up traffic.
I read a lot of weekly and monthly magazines. I like to look at pictures in them sometimes. I love charts. Audiobooks would not be a sufficient replacement. Plus, then I can’t listen to my CDs
If the light turns green and they’re not on the street, its a safe bet they’re not going to start crossing right then. And how unlikely is it to be walking, first of all, then have someone who is also walking that you know approach you at that exact time? That has never ever happened to me. Unless I’m at a street fair where everyone’s walking around, and in which case I wouldn’t be reading anyways, then that’s an implausible scenario. The couple would have seen the light turn yellow and not attempt to cross so that by the time it turns green, they would wait for the next one
Its difficult to miss a cyclist. That’s not going to happen
Lights don’t turn green the instant the perpendicular street’s light turn red. There’s a slight delay. If the semi was running the red, it would be in the intersection or almost passed it by the time it turned green. Plus, remember, I look up first and I would see that. Even if I were distracted, its hard difficult to spot a moving semi
Even if I were paying attention to the guy across from me, I can’t tell whether he’s going to turn or not. Plus, I’ve never had someone making a left turn across my path while I’m going straight if we were both at the front of the intersection. Just for your own safety’s sake, you let the guy going straight pass first and wait for an opening. You’re describing the behavior of the suicidal person
Again, you take driving way less seriously than you should. Even if you have no self-preservation instinct, you should try to think of others once in a while. Yet you don’t look at pedestrians or think about their safety, and it’s never occurred to you that your unrestrained body would make an excellent and deadly projectile as it exits your car through the windshield? Or occurred to you that it might be somewhat traumatic for the onlookers and EMTs who have to scrape your guts off the pavement? Or for the guy in the parking lot who backs over you because you are ambling along unpredictably while engrossed in your book/game/toy/etc?
You obviously have an endless ability to justify all the things you do, but you’re lying to yourself if you think the road is anywhere near as controlled as you seem to think.
I have seen all these things happen. Meeting a friend while walking? Sure. People sprinting across at a yellow light. Yep. Cars not seeing cyclists. Yes, and I’m usually the cyclist, so that sucks. Cars running a red - even one that had changed from green a while back? Uh-huh. Left turner oblivious to oncoming traffic? Had to give a witness statement for exactly that scenario when it happened right in front of me as I stood on a street corner.
I know you think you’re safe, but the evidence suggests that you’re not. Remember, 50% of drivers are worse than average, and most of them think they’re great. And most of them go along fine, justifying all the minor ‘no big deal’ things, until they cause a massive accident. You really need to either change your habits or think about giving up driving and look into mass transit, where you can read and play with your toys all you want while someone responsible drives.
Enipla’s examples were right on the money. Cavalierly dismissing them doesn’t help your case. “It’s difficult to miss a cyclist. That’s not going to happen.” There are lots of cyclists – and car drivers – who would testify that it’s not that hard to miss a cyclist, and they have police reports to confirm it.
The whole point is that accidents happen, even when you’re paying attention to your surroundings. When you’re not paying attention to your surroundings, the risk goes way up. If you’re reading, you’re not paying attention, simple as that.
I always try to make eye contact with the driver whose car I’m crossing in front of, because I (or the child with me) can be hurt if the car lurches forward even a few inches because you shifted your foot for a second. I want the driver to see that we’re in front of the car and be careful. If you’re reading, I’d worry that the light could change and if we’re tardy about crossing, you might look up and go suddenly because you weren’t aware of who’s around you.
To technically back up what is so obvious to everyone else…
“In-depth crash investigations have found that more than 40 percent of the human causal factors in accidents relate to errors in information processing, including perception, attention, distraction, recognition and/or decision. Sussman et al. found that drivers failed to initiate a pre-crash avoidance maneuver in 38 percent of fatal collisions. It is obvious that attention is very important for safe driving…”
excerpt from Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Traffic Control Devices Handbook
In any case, given what you have already written I imagine you’ll refute the applicability of these statistics. But refuting that the above does not apply to you because you are not moving your vehicle at the time of your reading is folly. If everyone distracted themselves while momentarily stopped in traffic the number of accidents would skyrocket.
It is very similar to saying “I don’t signal, never had an accident so why should I bother. It may not seem safe to everyone else but I disagree so I’m going to do what I think is right.” Well, if everyone didn’t signal not everyone would have an accident. Some might make it through 50 years of driving just fine. But many wouldn’t.
I sincerely hope no one ever is injured or dies due to your lack of attention to the road.
If I had seen a driver not only in the crosswalk but actually reading a magazine I would have not only tapped on his damned car but tried to memorize his license number so I could report him to the police. My husband had three broken bones a few years back because some idiot driver admitted he wasn’t paying attention at a stop light.
I can’t believe you continue to defend your actions here. Pay attention when behind the wheel or do the right thing and take the bus.
The hood-knocker was annoying, but no damage was done and you were mostly blocking the crosswalk, so big deal, let Mr. Outraged Pedestrian have his moment of glory.
I don’t see a big problem in glancing at a magazine while stopped at a red light, except sooner or later you’ll get engrossed enough to miss the light turning green, someone behind you will honk and WWIII will ensue.
