Rosenberger on Driving While Distracted
Posted August 6, 2015
External Article: Yahoo! Parenting
Robert Rosenberger, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, discussed the phenomenon of driving while distracted with Yahoo! Parenting. Drivers are increasingly aware of the dangers of texting and driving; however, not everyone realizes how dangerous it can be to drive while performing a secondary task such as eating a sandwich, talking on the phone, or checking the GPS.
“The reality is that drivers are not really good at knowing how distracted they are,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “It’s very normal for drivers to be overconfident about how they are able to handle driving distractions. One government survey found that most people think other people are bad at driving while talking on the phone or texting, but also everybody thinks that they are the exception to the rule. So it’s not that people don’t know it can be distracting to do these things behind the wheel, but that people think those statistics don’t apply to them.”
This debate has been triggered by a recent accident where a forty-year-old driver crashed into a brother and sister on a Michigan freeway, killing the thirteen-year-old boy and injuring the sixteen-year-old, who was driving. The driver told the police that he had been checking his GPS and eating a sandwich and didn’t notice that the traffic had stopped in front of him.
What can be done? Some argue that the goal should be changing people’s mindsets rather than stricter driving laws. Rosenberger argues that both are important.
“The law is always going to be so far behind the advancing technology, so we need a cultural shift,” he says. “Drunk driving, through the efforts of activist groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is generally accepted as a bad thing to do. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but people know that it’s not OK. That’s what we need with distracted driving. Right now it’s seen as something normal — it needs to be one of those things where, if someone receives a call from someone they know is driving, they don’t pick up. Or, if we’re the passenger, we won’t let the person driving have their phone.”
Unfortunately, Rosenberger says, much of society is moving in the opposite direction. “These days, companies market their cars as infotainment systems,” he says. “We think of driving as not just a task we’re trying to get done responsibly, but we believe the car is a mobile workplace where we have to get other stuff done while we’re sitting and wasting time.”
Rosenberger says all drivers need to remember one thing: Any of us could be that person checking the GPS and eating lunch. “We all should feel like that could happen to us,” he says. “We all should feel like we could be that driver.”
Robert Rosenberger’s research at Georgia Tech focuses on the analysis of the ways technologies are wrapped up in contexts of conceptualization, use, and bodily habit.
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