Humans are inherently distracted; stop with the new bills trying to target drivers

As you know, the distracted driving bill died in Olympia and it should have. It was an awful, awful law. It would have made it illegal to use your phone even if you were stopped at a light or in stand-still traffic. You wouldn’t have been able to send a quick text to your wife to say you’ll be late coming home, or a note to your kid who’s waiting for you after soccer practice.

Legislators went this far with the bill in part because, frankly, they’re an older set of folks who didn’t grow up with phones and they can’t understand the culture around technology, nor can they understand a younger demographics’ ability to multitask.

That doesn’t mean you should be texting or Facebooking or tweeting while driving on I-405. There are definitely some dangers. The fatal crash in Kent last week shows that, but let’s use common sense.

A lot of folks think it’s common sense to use hands-free technology, but Deborah Hersman, CEO of the National Safety Council, said not so much. She was in town to promote Distracted Driving Awareness Month, which yes, apparently is a real thing.

Hersman told The Seattle Times that:

“The National Safety Council did a poll last year, and we found that a majority of the public believes that hands-free is safer.

Having your hand on the phone is not necessarily the issue that’s distracting. If it was having your hand occupied, then we would have outlawed stick shifts many years ago. So it’s not the fact that your hand is engaged in the task. It’s that your brain is distracted by the task.

Forty-six states have texting bans, but no state has a ban for both handheld and hands-free devices.

There are 30 studies that show that hands-free is the same level of risk as handheld. Human beings are not multitaskers. Our brains are serial processors. You’re really switching back and forth between multiple tasks.

Carnegie-Mellon University actually did brain scans to show when people are driving [on simulators] and they’re talking on the phone, 37 percent of their brain capacity is diverted.”

So if it were true that we’re inherently not good at multitasking and that we can’t talk and drive, wouldn’t we see a ton of accidents? Wouldn’t we just have accident after accident after accident?

Half of what we do on a drive is think — think about our jobs, our family, our relationships, our weekend plans, our dinner plans. We are nonstop thinking.

If you’re in the car listening to KIRO Radio, you’re actively engaged in the conversation we’re having.

How often do we have conversations with passengers? We need more and more people in the car to count for carpool and to save the environment, so I imagine we’re talking to each other.

How often does a song come on and all of a sudden you’re singing along? You have to sign along to Foreigner, you have to. I have 30 different studies, also by Carnegie Mellon, that say when a Foreigner song comes on your iPod or radio, you are compelled to sing.

Why aren’t there more crashes and fatalities if this is truly as dangerous as the National Safety Council is saying? Pure luck?

In 2013, according to the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, you had only 116 fatal crashes related to distracted driving. You had 116 fatal crashes out of a population of nearly 7 million.

Yes, we want them to be zero, but we know that will never happen. There will always be fatalities and serious injuries as a result of driving.

There will always be fatalities from bicycling or walking and running. Yes, let’s get it to zero, but let’s not try to fear monger and push people away from something that’s clearly safer than physically using the phone. At some point, people hear this coming from the activists and they’re just going to completely tune you out.