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First International Conference on Distracted Driving

Toronto  --  2-5 October, 2005

Hosted by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation [TIRF]

Report by Eddie Wren, Executive Director, Drive and Stay Alive, Inc.

The early-morning drive to Toronto was a reminder -- if ever one were needed -- as to the purpose of the trip.

The tangerine disk of the rising sun glowed only dimly through thick mists over the west end of Lake Ontario -- "Magenta" the anchor on CHFI radio called it, but before I could mutter a word of contradiction his female co-presenter laughed and praised him for trying, but then told him quite rightly that magenta was certainly not the correct description for this particular morning's sun.

And -- at various times -- ahead of me, behind me and alongside me, while this ethereal sky was slowly brightening, were some rather bad drivers.

Were all of the bad drivers actually distracted drivers?  No, many clearly were not.  These were generally the ones with both hands on the wheel, eyes firmly on the road ahead and accelerator firmly planted on the floor -- the aggressive speed-team.

And, of course, there were plenty individuals who were driving responsibly -- it is always too easy to forget these people.

Then, 2½ hours and 110 miles from home, I arrived at the Hilton Hotel, in downtown Toronto, to spend the next three days listening to some of North America's top experts -- and others from further afield -- talking in great detail about distracted driving.

"Humans are essentially serial, limited-capacity processors of information," said Dr. Alison Smiley, early in the proceedings, and this one telling sentence provided the foundation for much of the day's information.

Dr. Smiley was one of three speakers in that first session of the day:

What Is Distracted Driving?

"We all operate by switching our attention very rapidly from one thing to another," explained Dr. Smiley.

"Additional resources [in the human brain] are very limited.

"Think of two people walking while having a deep conversation.  Eventually, they will slow down or even stop.  We cannot even regulate something as basic as walking if we are too distracted.

"Look around this room," she said.

"In just one second, one billion bits of information will register in your sense organs. But only 16 of these one billion bits will reach your conscious awareness and only 0.7 of one bit will make a lasting impression."

The implications were clear:  The average person registers very little indeed of their surroundings, even under undistracted circumstances, and according to Dr. Smiley this is a key reason why a distracted driver has a three to four times greater risk of having a crash.

[Dr. Smiley is President of Human Factors North.]

Shortly afterwards, Dr. Herb Simpson made it clear that as yet there has never been a definitive scientific study of distracted driving.  [Dr. Simpson is President and CEO of the TIRF.]

How Risky is Distracted Driving-- Overblown or Understated?

One of the most illuminating moments of the conference came when Dr. Doug Beirness asked the audience to vote on whether distracted driving, at present, is either overblown or an understated threat.

Given that this was a gathering of road safety professionals it can be no great surprise that "an understated threat" won the day, but it is perhaps important to note that not one person, either from North America or Europe, voted the opposite way.

Referring to the 2003 NHTSA survey on distracted driving, Dr. Beirness then asked a question that is at the very heart of the problem:  How do we make the issue of distracted driving more serious [in the minds of] drivers?

[Dr. Beirness is Vice President, Research, at the TIRF.]

Dr. Jane Stutts was next to speak and presented a lot of interesting data.

"'Nitsa' [i.e. the NHTSA] conservatively estimates that 25-30 percent of crashes involve driver inattention," she said.

One of her other key comments came at the end of her presentation.  She pointed out that when the 50 American states were asked to quantify the involvement of distracted driving in terms of crash causation, two states showed it as being a factor in 0.7 percent of crashes but at the other extreme one state showed its involvement in more than 32 percent of crashes.

From such disparate figures the conference attendees were left to make the obvious assumption that there is either a serious lack of uniformity in reporting or wild differences between states in the understanding of distracted driving and its true importance.

[Dr. Stutts is Associate Director for Social and Behavioral Research, University of North Carolina Safety Research Center.]

Throughout the conference, the most frequently mentioned cause of distraction was cell phone use by drivers.  

The next speaker, Dr. David Strayer, focused the audience on three questions:

1. Does conversing on a cell phone interfere with driving?

2. If so, what are the sources of the interference?

3. How significant is the interference?

In simultaneously addressing questions 1 and 3, he gave details of sample surveys undertaken at four-way stops.

For the purposes of these surveys, stopping at the lawfully correct place was the criterion for the violation and this was covertly monitored by state troopers to ensure the accuracy and uniformity of results.

As can be deduced from the above table, 21.4 percent of the drivers who were not seen to be using a cell phone failed to stop correctly for the stop signs. For those drivers who were seen to be using a cell phone however, the proportion leaps dramatically and 74.5 percent of them failed to stop correctly. 

Dr. Strayer commented that cell phone conversations create inattention blindness for traffic-related events and scenarios, and that this inattention blindness applies to all types of danger, including child pedestrians.

He also pointed out that there are major differences between cell phone conversations, and conversations with passengers. One of the reasons for this is that the latter tend to be collaborative -- for example: going quiet at busy moments, helping to pick out exits or street names, etc.

[Dr. Strayer is Professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Utah.]

The TIRF excelled themselves by publishing a full write-up of this event only two weeks afterwards. (Many organizations take several months to achieve similar results.)  Click here to view the full summary, which is also available in French.