Can technology solve the problems it creates?
That question came to the forefront again as several companies took the Distracted Driving Summit meeting on Tuesday in Washington as an opportunity to push new technologies to prevent or reduce the dangers of texting and talking on cellphones while driving.
The event emphasized the real problems that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said were evident on the road. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 6,000 people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted driver and more than half a million were injured.
There is no national law barring drivers from using cellphones. Thirty states and the District of Columbia prohibit drivers from texting, and eight states have passed laws barring drivers from using hand-held cellphones. And there have been efforts to encourage nationwide compliance, like a bill sponsored by Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, that would withhold a portion of transportation money to states that refuse to pass laws against drivers’ text messaging. But many safety advocates and industry experts say they believe that tickets and fines aren’t enough of a deterrent.
“You can pass all the laws you want and educate people,” said Matt Howard, the founder and chief executive of Zoomsafer, “but the practical reality is people can’t resist reaching for their phone when they are behind the wheel.”
Consequently, Mr. Howard’s solution is to shut off access to phones when they are in a car. His company offers software that can automatically disable texting and calls on a BlackBerry when the owner gets into a vehicle.
Called MobileSafer, the software requires an annual $25 subscription. It was originally intended to use the GPS function of BlackBerrys to determine when an owner was driving based on speed. Then it could shut off phone, text and e-mail alerts, as well as be set to respond automatically with a note like “I’m driving right now and will respond as soon as I arrive at my destination.”
The trouble with the GPS-only approach, however, was that it would also disable a phone — except for emergency 911 calls — whenever the owner was, say, in the passenger seat or on a bus or in a train. So Zoomsafer recently improved the software by also using Bluetooth to determine when the user is behind the wheel.
Basically, the idea is to pair your phone with the built-in Bluetooth system in your car or with a Bluetooth speakerphone you use only in the car. The cellphone user then identifies that pairing as the danger zone, at which point the software can be set to automatically disable texting, for example, whenever it is paired with that Bluetooth device. The company is also planning a version for popular Google Android-based phones by the end of the year.
Of course, approaches like MobileSafe and those of competitors, like tXtBlocker and iZup, can always be defeated (or simply shut off) by a determined texter. But the idea is to take some basic measures to reduce the number of tempting technological distractions. And Mr. Howard of Zoomsafer expects the number of those distractions to increase in the future.
Indeed, both Ford and OnStar from General Motors are adding services to their vehicles this year that will enable more Internet-based smartphone functions in the car. Ford’s Sync system will allow Twitter and Pandora fans to tap into those functions via voice and in-dash controls. OnStar is testing a Facebook app and text-to-speech technology that reads text messages aloud.
Many companies argue that the additional functions are safer if they use voice recognition technology and therefore allow drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Nuance, the company behind many in-car voice recognition systems, including those in the 2011 Ford Edge and 2011 Lincoln MKX, says it believes that its technology can help.
In a statement, the Nuance spokesman Richard Mack, said, “We need to stop debating the causes of distracted driving and focus instead on immediate solutions that will make our roads safer — and voice technologies have proved to be our best option for significantly reducing myriad manual and visual distractions behind the wheel.”
Not everyone agrees. Mr. LaHood, for example, often refers to what researchers call cognitive overload as more a problem. Several early studies indicate that for some drivers, just talking on a hands-free phone or interacting with voice commands can cause cognitive overload and substantially increase the possibility of an accident.
“The question is,” Mr. Howard said, “when does too much of a good thing become a bad thing?”