It is widely accepted that driver distraction is a major contributor in causing many road crashes. Professor Mike Regan discusses factors inside and outside the vehicle which can affect a driver’s level of concentration.
Prime Mover: Is it the internal or the external distractions that we should be working on or both?
MR: Both really. Around 70 per cent of distraction-related crashes derive from driver interaction with sources within the vehicle such as mobile phones and passengers. The external distractions, however, have been less researched and are a little more difficult to manage than the internal ones. There are a number of things in the external environment which have been found in crash studies to be distracting including animals, interesting architecture, advertising signage, construction zones, crash scenes, and even road rage incidents. Some traffic signs themselves can be distracting if they are poorly designed and located and take up too much of your attention.
PM: Is it natural for us to find something outside to draw our eyes away from the road ahead?
MR: Generally you’d be doing that if the driving task itself was not particularly engaging, such as driving on a highway with hardly any traffic and no cross traffic. That’s when you find people will tend to allow their attention to drift away from driving itself. It’s not fundamentally the driver’s fault that distraction is a problem as they don’t really understand the subtle impacts distraction has on their driving performance. When you’ve got your mind off the road that’s going to cause gaze concentration, which means you focus your eyes more on the straight road ahead and pay less attention to things in your periphery, like cross-traffic and rear-view mirrors.
PM: Can people be taught not to be distracted?
MR: Some of the sources of distraction that grab your attention involuntarily, like some advertising signage and spectacular scenery, are impossible to ignore. The information that young drivers get when they are learning to drive isn’t so much around understanding the effects of distraction and how to manage them. It’s more about using laws and enforcement to stamp out the problem. I don’t think that’s ever going to work and we’ve got to tackle it in other ways. The whole focus so far has been to attempt to stop people from being distracted but the fact is they will continue to be distracted, not just by technology but everyday things inside and outside the vehicle. So the best thing you can do is to help them to manage distraction.
PM: What are some of the effects of distraction?
MR: Distraction does one or more of four things – it can take your eyes off the road, it can take your mind off the road, and it can take your ears off the road in the sense that, if your mind is off the road, it also overrides the ability to hear things such as sirens. The final thing is if you’re holding something such as a phone you’ve got one hand off the wheel which can affect steering control especially in an emergency. Each of these effects has follow-on effects, like gaze concentration and inattentional blindness when you take your mind off the road.
PM: Can vehicle design help counter distraction?
MR: We need to incentivise vehicle manufacturers to design car and truck cockpits which are more usable and less distracting. There is a wide variation between vehicles in the design of the human-machine interface (HMI) through which drivers interact with in-vehicle information and communication systems. Some interactions are way more distracting than others for some functions. For example, there is an increasing prevalence in having ‘soft’ controls via touch screens. Touchscreens are useful for accessing some information but if you want to change the speed on your windscreen wipers you shouldn’t be doing that via multiple actions on a touch screen. You should be doing that with a hard control stalk which doesn’t require any visual attention and is much less distracting. We’ve got a star rating system for assessing the safety of new cars the Australasian New car Assessment Program: ANCAP. Why not have a star rating system for the assessment of the ergonomic quality of the human-machine interface in vehicles, including trucks? You get a star rating for how usable the cockpit is and how minimally distracting it is. That would encourage competition between designers to produce more usable and less distracting cockpits.
PM: Will driver monitoring systems play a part?
MR: Driver monitoring systems will, within the next two or three years, be included as one of the primary safety features required by any car model in Europe to get a 5-star safety rating by the European New Car Assessment Program (EuroNCAP). We are heading in that direction in Australia as well, as our ANCAP is now closely aligned with EuroNCAP. All these systems are becoming increasingly capable, the safety benefits they can provide are becoming increasingly obvious. These systems can detect if people are getting sleepy or showing signs of fatigue or are visually distracted. Some systems in research labs are becoming capable of detecting people’s emotions and can tell whether the person is looking stressed, excited and so on, and in the future, there will be many other human behaviours and characteristics in people’s driving which these systems will be able to pick up on. The great advantage of these systems is they can be connected electronically to active and passive safety systems in the vehicle such as autonomous emergency braking and seatbelt pre-tensioners. So, if the driver is distracted, these systems can be primed for early intervention to prevent a crash or mitigate its impact.
PM: What are the next challenges on the distraction landscape?
MR: We have got to get more vehicles on the roads with driver monitoring and active safety systems like lane keeping assistance and Autonomous Emergency Braking because if people get distracted they could save their lives. We’ve got to get greater compliance with road rules, either by redesigning the current road rules to make them more enforceable or enhancing detection initiatives like real-time video cameras that can see people being distracted. We have got to be incentivising road and traffic engineering authorities to design road and traffic infrastructure which is less distracting, and we’ve got to clamp down on advertising billboards that are distracting. It’s also important to get the people who are developing distraction prevention and mitigation measures, whether they be legal, education or design solutions, to evaluate them. Otherwise, how do we know whether or not they are working to reduce road trauma?