Not eating. Or smoking, or listening to the radio. Almost nothing distracts and incapacitates like a phone call - an odd fact, but as a frequent passenger and professional driver, an obvious one to me. Nobody drives well while on the phone.
I have often hypothesized that the problem with a cellphone (hand-held or hands-free) is that it completely dominates one ear, leaving the other as the only source of environmental sound. Remembering that our forebrain is quite neatly divided into two hemispheres, I suggest that this might result in each of the two focusing entirely on its own environment and losing touch with the other's. So if one hemisphere is alarmed by a weeping babysitter while the other one hears an auto horn (from a direction it can't identify because it has lost the ability for stereophonic placement), it might take the two hemispheres a fourth of a second to decide who gets to be in charge. At freeway speed your car travels more than one car-length in a quarter of a second! This could make the difference between screeching to a halt and crashing into the next car.
My evidence to support this hypothesis is the 1970s, when almost every driver on the road had a CB radio. Talking on a CB wasn't just a matter of "hand-held," it was downright awkward! The microphone was connected to the dashboard by a spiral cable. Yet I never heard of an accident caused by using a CB while driving. Why? Because the sound came through a
loudspeaker in the dashboard, just like the radio! It didn't block the sounds going into either ear, so you could still hear the traffic and the emergency vehicles just fine,
in stereo so you knew where they were.
Most car stereos already have a jack for plugging in external sound sources like iPods. All we need is for cellphones to sprout output cables like iPods that can be plugged into those jacks. Then we can hear the sound through the stereo speakers and still hear the real world outside.
I guarantee that the cellphone accident rate will drop to almost zero.
As for other distractions, a comedian once said something that I thought was pretty astute:
People who eat while they're driving are much more dangerous than drunks. Drunks are at least trying to drive. People who are eating just want the sugar!
Checking on the backseat child is a hazard, and one poorly considered by the child safety folks. It's a hazard to others - the thing governments are supposed to concern themselves with.
Oh don't get me started on that Big Nanny lunacy! The reason we're now required to put children in the back seat is that every year something like forty children were killed by air bags in the front seat. But now, something like
seventy children are killed every year by
heat stroke, from being forgotten in the back seat. The shit-for-brains government actually
made it worse!
Yes of course, we're all perfect parents (well not me, I don't have kids) who would never in a million years forget that our precious baby is in the back seat. Yet it happens to some American seventy times every year. The usual scenario is that the spouse calls with an emergency--my check to the caterer bounced so they won't bring the food to the graduation party tonight unless you go over there right now and give them your Visa card. So you end up coming to work at a different time, from a different direction, maybe even parking in a different lot. All of your daily habits are overridden. You've got no cues to remind yourself of the back seat passenger that you completely forgot to drop off at day care because you didn't even drive down the street where the day care center is located.
Some guy invented a really cool device that attaches to the bottom of the back seat and can tell that something with the exact weight of a baby in a baby seat is there. If you turn off the engine and close the doors, it will make siren noises at you. No way could you forget little Oscar in the backseat with one of those things.
And ya know what? He couldn't sell the patent to any manufacturer. They did lots of market research and discovered that
nobody would buy the thing. Nobody can admit to themselves that
they might be confused enough to leave their precious baby in the car. So
they don't need a warning siren.
This is something that Big Nanny will have to legislate and force the manufacturers to include in the standard equipment.
** The libertarian sighs dejectedly. **