This 100%. When I drive, I watch the road. I don't watch my mobile phone, I don't watch the kids behind, I don't watch my wife. I don't watch the sky. I don't watch the GPS.
I just watch the road in front of me.
My idea is that the car has been behaving well for a long time and consequently the driver lowered is vigilance. Big mistake.
That, but also: it's genuinely hard to focus on something where your focus is redundant 99.9% of the time. This is actually something I admire in HGV drivers: they can sit on a motorway, constant speed, same lane, for hours, but react immediately to a danger (yeah I know they have accidents too, but on the whole it seems true).
Just because a driver has less things to attend to does not mean he is less attentive. In fact, I would argue a person becomes less attentive to any given thing the more things there are they have to pay attention to.
Burdening a driver with more (arguably unnecessary) cognitive load is not a good idea.
They're also unable to predict what the human drivers next to them will do because the human drivers don't understand the situation they are in.
Anecdotally, the most common flaw I experience while driving (self or not) is me reacting to traffic in front while another car is only reacting to me, the car most immediately in front of them, passes (often erratically switching lanes), merges with less than a car length, only to slam on their brakes because the traffic in front of me has no openings.
They're not convinced that it impairs their driving.
Consider that a plurality, if not a majority of the population is convinced that they're efficient at multi-tasking, and specifically that they can perform each task as well as in isolation. But we know that almost nobody multitasks well, period, and absolutely not with equivalent performance.
That's why road redesigns that makes drivers less comfortable with high speeds are important. It makes them slow down and also become more attentive. People respond to the psychological cues of their built environment. Here's a YouTube short explaining it: https://youtube.com/shorts/MyT7F5zuOU4
This extends to road conditions. Getting stuck on medians, taking a corner in the rain too fast. Not noticing a tree while parking. Not noticing brakes making horrible screaming sounds. Not noticing after weeks of screaming sounds that the car starts diving for the left lane.
Do you have a statistically large enough sample to conclude that they're worse at driving that you are? Most cases of driver inattention don't escalate to a collision, so trying to infer inattention rates from collision rates is pretty noisy.
And even assuming this was simply a case of a bad driver, what policy approach would you suggest to protect the general public against such drivers? Accepting that drivers are fallible and designing our road systems to be robust against that seems a more effective approach than berating those drivers who are particularly unlucky in the consequences of their failures of attentiveness.
To be a safe driver your eyes need to be constantly focused on the road, and even 15 seconds looks away can cause significant problem. Maybe you need less mental attention then I use, but it physically requires a lot of attention.
It's not about misconceptions, humans just aren't capable of it. Maintaining concentration when you're actively taking part in a task is doable, but maintaining concentration when you haven't had to do _anything_ for the past two hours is not. It isn't about whether the driver believes they should be paying attention or not, it's just not how human attention works.
If you're not paying attention, you can easily end up dozing off. You're either more or less paying attention--and yes drivers' attentions can drift a bit--or you're going to take some time to reacquire some awareness of what exactly is going on.
there is no study, including this one, that supports what you are saying. one of the challenges is that the driver often, "often" where is this often coming from? do you sit in with drivers and watch them? they often do this. you are completely making that up.
Sadly, competent human drivers are rare. Humans are terrible at paying attention to boring things and accidents are too rare to keep people's attention. Worse it's the edge cases where someone is not paying attention that tends to lead to most accidents.
The problem is that the "paying attention" part of driving is actually one of the most mentally taxing for the driver and it seems the pay attention 100% of the time is basically the same as saying 5% of the time an event might occurs that requires your immediate action. The problem being that if you have to jump into action to avoid something catastrophic 'sometimes' you basically have to be paying full attention all the time in order to collect enough contextual information about the incident. It's the same as watching someone toss a baseball to you and catching it vs your friend yelling "Headts up!" as a baseball is already flying through the air at your head.
> failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting passes of the ball
I'm not sure how this applies to commuting, except when the driver is attentively looking at other cars.
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