NHTSA Proposes Guidelines Against “Excessively Distracting Devices”

William Messerschmidt
Principal Technical Analyst
MSC

On 02/24/12, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed new guidelines for auto manufacturers that cover original-equipment, in-vehicle devices that augment or facilitate “secondary tasks” in which visual information is received and a physical action is performed in response to that information.

By “secondary tasks,” NHTSA means actions that we perform while we operate or control the vehicle, which are not part of the primary task (driving), such as entertainment and communication. For example, the timely prompt from your GPS device to “in a half mile, make a right turn,” is considered part of the primary task (driving), but texting a friend your arrival time is a secondary task.

Almost all drivers engage in secondary tasks while driving (such as adjusting climate control, changing radio stations), and often there is very little decrease in their safety. However, as technological advances make more and more options accessible to the driver, the potential exists to build in dangerous devices. For example: your in-dash GPS display isn’t a distraction under most circumstances, but imagine if that same display showed your Facebook News Feed! [Please note that absolutely no manufacturer has ever proposed this extreme example.]

In order to differentiate between the less extreme (and more realistic) examples of safe versus unsafe technology, researchers considered variables such as the type of information displayed, the manner in which it is displayed, and the type of manual response elicited by the information.

The NHTSA guideline describes five types of displays or devices that are always unsafe. They are:

• Photographic or video images not immediately related to driving (images such as blindspot cameras, GPS navigation, and weather information are considered directly related to the driving task);
• Photographic or graphical static visual images that are unrelated to driving (such as album art and personal photos);
  
• Automatically scrolling text;
• Manual text entry of more than six key presses;
• Reading more than 30 characters (not including spaces and punctuation).

You can read a short summary of the new NHTSA Guidelines at Occupational Safety Online, or view the document in its entirety in the Federal Register, Vol. 77, Issue 37.

"Novice Mistakes" and Distracted Driving Among Teen Drivers

Garrick Infanger

Armstrong Forensic Engineers

MSC would like to thank our friends at Armstrong Forensic Engineers for this guest post.

Distracted driving is now a hot topic among both legislators and the press. Should car accidents resulting from texting be treated as a crime? Are anti-texting laws and service announcements effective?

Georgia's July 1, 2010 ban of texting while driving makes it one of 30 states with similar laws. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that there is some debate as to whether texting laws actually increase the rate of accidents as people attempt to text out of sight from police, actually furthering their attention from the roadway.

Utah recently passed a new law that penalizes drivers who text to the same degree as drivers who drink and drive. The New York Times reports, "In effect, a crash caused by such a multitasking motorist is no longer considered an 'accident' like one caused by a driver who, say, runs into another car because he nodded off at the wheel. Instead, such a crash would now be considered inherently reckless."

Even Oprah has gotten in on the debate with a campaign titled the "No Phone Zone." What else leads teen drivers into accidents? Should we be looking at other "novice driving" mistakes?

Tara Parker-Pope looks at teen drivers at her blog "Well":

Teenagers are notoriously bad drivers, accounting for 10 times as many crashes as middled-aged ones. But short of keeping them off the road entirely, is there a way to make their driving safer - for them and for the rest of us?

New research suggests that there is. A nationally representative sample of more than 800 crashes involving teenage drivers shows that almost two-thirds were due not to reckless behavior like speeding or joyriding but to three novice driving mistakes: failing to scan the road, misjudging driving conditions and becoming distracted.

Focusing on these three common mistakes could go a long way in improving teenage driving and reducing fatalities, said an author of the report, Dr. Dennis Durbin, co-director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

With the encouraging news that truck-related fatalities continue to decrease, we can hope the state of teen drivers also improves with time.

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Garrick Infanger writes for the Forensic Engineering Hub, an engineering-focused blog sponsored by Armstrong Forensic Engineers.

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Photo Credit: Stuart Bradford

Bill Messerschmidt Presents at IAARS Annual Conference

On July 19, 2010, MSC’s Principal Technical Analyst, Bill Messerschmidt, had the opportunity to address the annual conference of the International Association of Accident Reconstruction Specialists (IAARS).

At this year’s conference, Bill provided a presentation on human factors in vehicle collision reconstruction, as well as a session on heavy vehicle Event Data Recorder (EDR) technology. Learn more about heavy vehicle EDRs.

The conference was held at the Mall of America Radisson Hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota, and was attended by civilian and law enforcement crash investigators and engineers from across the US and Canada.

Conference organizer and IAARS president Dan Lofgren said, “It was a very good seminar experience for all in attendance, in large part due to your presentations. We had very good feedback.” Positive feedback can be attributed in large part to the subject matter experts invited by IAARS and the excellent planning and facilities chosen by the organizers.

Other speakers included Dr. Frank Navin, Mr. Peter Murphy, Dr. Don Schmalzbauer, IAARS president Dan Lofgren, and textbook author Myron Lofgren. It was an honor for Bill and MSC to be included “on the ticket” with these people.

The cost of the conference was $75 for members of IAARS, and it provided ACTAR continuing education credits for accredited reconstruction experts. MSC is looking forward to the 2011 IAARS Conference.

Working WITH the Driver

We recently had the opportunity to see a really great application of Human Factors/Cognitive Science to traffic safety. The photo above shows a speed limit sign on a roadway around a shopping center in Fultondale, Alabama. Do you notice anything strange? Of course you do! That is precisely why this sign is so effective.

Humans are biased toward remembering distinct events--events that “stick out like a sore thumb.” This cognitive bias, called the Von Restorff Effect, often gets us in trouble because we remember unusual events so well that we overestimate their likelihood. An example of this is people worrying more about being struck by lightning than being injured in a car accident.

In the case of the 27mph speed limit sign, the designers employed the Von Restorff Effect to help us remember the speed limit! This is an excellent example of Human Factors being creatively applied to traffic safety.