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Friday, April 21, 2006

Driven to Distraction

Captain Obvious puts the barrel in his mouth and starts squeezing the trigger:

Nearly 80 percent of crashes...involved some form of driver inattention within three seconds before the event. Primary causes of driver inattention are distracting activities, such as cell phone use, and drowsiness.

Drowsiness is a significant problem that increases a driver's risk of a crash or near-crash by at least a factor of four.

Yes, falling asleep does indeed make it difficult to drive. Being that it's a federal agency, I'm guessing at least 1,000 hours and ten million dollars worth of research were involved in this "landmark study." Nice to know our tax dollars are being spent wisely.

posted by Jar(egg)head at 08:28

1 Comments:

Blogger Banduar said...

The only redeeming thing about this study is a comment made in
this article:

"I urge legislators not to interpret these results as a need for new legislative initiatives. It is simply not good public policy to pass laws addressing every type of driver behavior," said Lt. Col. Jim Champagne, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association.

Sadly, this statement is the most intelligent thing that came out of this study. "Legislative initiatives" based on shoddy "scientific" studies like these are becoming more and more common. (Can you say Kyoto? Good!) The mentality that we should make laws to protect us from every possible danger is absurd.

Common sense tells us that a driver's skill is the most crucial factor in avoiding accidents. Minimizing distractions is included in that skill set. Stricter standards on driving tests is the only way to address this. However, we are a nation that relies on automobiles for transportation, so people will drive cars whether they have a license or not. Unless we develop better transportation alternatives, we're going to have to deal with idiot drivers making the roads more dangerous. Legislation will do NOTHING to change this.

11:26  

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