A year ago in early March I picked up on the theme of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, known as March Madness, to describe the absurdity of traffic safety groups working hard to curb texting and distracted driving while auto manufacturers add to the inside of new vehicles a variety of devices and technology that are sure to make the problems worse.  If I had any doubt that our society is racing headlong into more distractions in more cars, I had only to pick up two newspapers on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011.

I first read Maureen Dowd’s column in the Sunday New York Times entitled, “Have You Driven a Smartphone Lately?”  Dowd recounts the attitudes of Ford executives defending their “Sync” system, which allows a driver to synchronize a Smartphone interface with a dashboard-mounted screen.  Dowd recounts the Ford people (who apparently invited her to Detroit to see for herself) reminding her that even before there were cell phones and iPods, drivers were detracted by things like “reaching for a briefcase or shooing away a bee.”  She quotes them as saying that “Telling young people not to use a cellphone is almost like saying, ‘Don’t breathe.'”  The good folks at Ford then explained to her, “We’ve got to figure out how we can make people safer, and the more people can just talk to their car like they’re talking to a passenger, the more useful it would be.”

Yikes!  To her credit, Dowd reports all of this with unmistakable measures of sarcasm and disbelief.  I would have been less restrained:  I would have asked these people if they have ever heard the term “cognitive blindness.”

Then I picked up the “LiveSmart” section of the Hartford Courant, a periodic review of new technology.  In an article called “The Connected Auto,”  written by Mark Smith of the Detroit Free Press,  I first read about a new device called a tiwi, which rhymes with kiwi.   This gadget (www.tiwi.com) is “a small computer that parents can install on the dash or windshield of a new teen driver’s car” that will tell the driver to slow down, and it will send parents text alerts if the driver is going too fast, not wearing a seat belt, or leaving a specified geographic area.  This device, the article said, knows the speed limit of every street.  [Note:  I do not endorse any such devices, and I do not endorse this one – I am just reporting what I read.]  I have read in the past about similar devices, though I cannot recall one that actually claimed to know the posted speed limits and to be able to report to parents when the vehicle exceeds it.

The next items in the very same article — the text simply transitioned to these other topics in the next paragraph, as if there were nothing odd or contradictory in doing so — were a description of a General Motors “aftermarket rearview mirror, a part of its Onstar service, which provides access to online radio. podcasts, and Facebook”;  then a product called BHF-2000 from a company called DriveNTalk, which allows hands-free access to your phone while driving; another called “AntiSleep Pilot,” which wakes the driver up when the vehicle shows a pattern of movement consistent with the operator falling asleep; and finally, the Toyota “Entune” system, its answer to Ford’s Sync, which allows the driver access “to services like Bing Internet searches and OpenTable for restaurant reservations.”

So, in two articles, one device to help parents keep their teens safe, several devices that will surely make driving by parents and teens much more distracting and dangerous, and one piece of commentary about the absurdity of it all.

I highly suspect that there are conversations going on within the federal government about all of this, with Transportation Secretary LaHood, who at least seems to be talking a good game about combating distracted driving, voicing his concern about these contradictory trends, but then being rebuffed by other parts of the government, perhaps the White House, telling him that the economic recovery of the American automobile industry and the job creation that will come with it are far more important national priorities than curbing distracted driving.  Perhaps, as often occurs with our traffic safety laws, it will take a string of horrific, multiple-fatality accidents, clearly involving one of these new, highly distracting Ford or Toyota or other new dashboard-mounted systems, before there is pushback from the general public and politicians. 

Meanwhile, the only things that are certain are that the rationales of the automobile executives quoted by Dowd are preposterous; our roads are becoming more dangerous as more and more of these distracting electronics find their way into new cars; and the whole thing, if we will just step back for a moment, is sheer and utter madness.

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