Pet Peeves #4 – idiot/cell-phone drivers
This one seems pretty self-explanatory. I, myself, will explain it 
Imagine, for a moment, that you are in a car, driving down the road (I hope you are not reading this while driving, I would be very disappointed in you if you were; if you are, please pull over before continuing, and try not to hit anybody). Think about all of the things that are going on. Let’s start simple, and say that you are the only car on the road.
Most of the interesting stuff is happening in or near the car. The tires interacting with the pavement is an important one. Tires are designed so that, when placed on a car of sufficient weight, they produce enough friction that your wheels do not spin uncontrollably, or start skidding, or anything of the sort. As all drivers soon learn, this is not foolproof – a little rain, or a little oil – or worse, a little of both – and you have no control over the vehicle’s direction of travel. Which is bad, because a road is a pretty narrow path – each lane is about 12 feet (about 3.6 meters) wide, and a typical car is a little over half that in width, meaning losing direction control could quickly send you off the road.
There’s a lot more going on inside the car, too. To turn, you manipulate the steering wheel. That’s connected to a steering column, which through clever use of hydraulics, is indirectly connected to your front wheels. Turning the steering-wheel causes the wheels to tilt (going from |==| when straight, to /==/ when turning right, to \==\ when turning left). There’s a lot going on in between, including hydraulics and, often, electronics. If any of that fails (hydraulic leak, lose power, blown fuse), you may again lose direction control, or at the very least lose power steering (reverting to “manual” steering, where the physical effort put forth by you is the actual effort used to tilt the wheels, except worse, because the steering system is set up to be powered, so it’s not at all optimized for manual steering!). A car with well-aligned wheels goes straight when you release the steering wheel; but if the wheels are at all out of alignment (or on some cars, if you’re accelerating), you may find the car drifting to one side or another – meaning you need to pay more attention to steering, even when you’re going straight.
There’s the transmission, too. For most of you, it’s probably a magic black box; the engine turns it, gears inside do things, and another connection is made to the wheels, so they’re all spinning at the right speed; and you rarely mess with it, except when you need to back up or park. Manual (stick/tree shift) transmissions do still exist, too (my mom has one!), in which case you realize that there’s a bit more too it – at different speeds, you need to shift to different gear-ratios. This is tricky when you’re first learning to do it in a manual transmission car; imagine the complexity of a device that does all of this mechanically, shifting gears when it senses it needs to. More parts, right? More parts means more things that can break, jamming up the works -and this is a particularly bad place to jam things up, since it determines whether or not a car can be moved at all, and (from what I’ve heard) is a ridiculously difficult piece of machinery to fix.
It’s connected directly to the motor, our next focus. Fuel/air mix goes in, rotational motion (“a spinning shaft”) comes out, right? Sure… if you’re taking a black-box kind of approach to it. There are explosions going on inside the engine. EXPLOSIONS! The fuel/air mix enters, yes; then, the spark plugs (at least one for each cylinder [most cars have either 4, 6, or 8 cylinders] [the cylinder is a kind of "reaction chamber" where what I am describing goes on; it consists of a piston and the surrounding metal frame of the engine]) makes it explode, pushing the piston out (transferring thermal energy to mechanical energy, in what I consider to be a pretty inefficient way). The exhaust leaves, and more fuel/air mix enters (you can learn about this cycle here). Stuff happens to the exhaust; it goes down a pipe towards the back of the car, through a catalytic converter (which reacts un-exploded gasoline) and a muffler (which makes it quieter). Problems with those won’t necessarily affect your driving, but they will affect your mileage; and if there’s a leak in one of the pipes, you could end up with toxic fumes in the cabin (“inside”) of the car, which leads to mental impairment of the operator (“you” or “the driver”). My main point, though – EXPLOSIONS! Isn’t that, like, dangerous or something? (When there was an explosion on Serenity, didn’t Zoe get hurt, and everyone almost die?)
How do you stop? With… brakes, right? What if the brakes are broke? What if they’re overheated, if they drag, if the pads are all gone, if there’s water on them? Then, they don’t work. You keep going until you hit something. That is bad.
The last major component of the car I’d like to mention is the electrical system. This system isn’t all that dangerous in and of itself – cars don’t produce or use dangerous levels of electricity. However, there is a lot that does depend on it, and a lot that goes through electronics or computers (the accelerator, oxygen sensors, spark plugs, to name a few). And… what happens when it gets wet? Well… it shorts out and stops working, that’s what. Happened to me once, it was pretty terrifying.
So, there’s so many things just inside the car that you should be worried about – enough to make anyone who stops to think about it, think twice about operating a motor vehicle. There are other potential problems inherent in driving, as well.
There are obstacles in the road. Little rocks, small branches, and squirrels don’t really count; boulders, pieces of other vehicles, teenagers, deer, those are all problems. You shouldn’t hit them, because then bad things will happen (damage to your vehicle, severe damage to yourself and your vehicle, lawsuits and possible criminal charges from the teenager’s parents and bff’s). It’s important to pay attention to what’s happening on the road in front of you, so that if a teenager riding a deer jumps out in front of you, you know to aim for the le… to try to avoid them. And, hopefully, to avoid them in such away that does not involve running your vehicle off the narrow strip of pavement and into a fire hydrant or toddler. These obstacles are more common than you may think, even if you drive; if you don’t believe me, then give me some credit, and the next time you drive, make a mental note every time you adjust your driving because of something you see in or near the road.
I haven’t yet mentioned cliffs, buffalo herds, sheer rock walls, or dead-ends yet, but these are all things that also make driving more dangerous. There’s a lot of stuff to watch out for, in the car and out of it, but as long as you’re listening for funny noises and watching what’s in front of you, you should be fine. Driving at this point is a little attention-demanding, but easy enough for most people.
But we were pretending that you were the only one on the road. Which is never the case (even at 2 AM)
You can anticipate what pedestrians and inanimate objects are going to do pretty well; you can even think of multiple things they’d do, and plan to do things that’d be safe with any case.
You can anticipate, to some degree, what other drivers are going to do. They (usually) signal when they’re going to turn, and have those red lights that come on when they’re slowing down. You know that you can keep enough distance for reaction to sudden moves, and everything will be OK.
However, other drivers aren’t all in front of you. You have to look out behind yourself, too (for those approaching from the rear, or those too close if you’re trying to stop); and both sides (if you’re turning or changing lanes); in fact, all 360 degrees.
So, add that to watching for the non-other-cars stuff we mentioned earlier. It’s harder, but if you put a majority of your concentration with it and are smart about your mirrors, it still sounds plausible.
That’s not all there is to it, of course.
You see, the other drivers are reacting to those same non-car cues that you are. In addition to reacting to the a) environmental (my “from-here-till-the-end-of-the-blog-post” term for “people, cats, large sticks, and other things that affect your driving without being moving cars”) cues and to b) other automobiles’ presence, you also have to anticipate c) the reactions of other motorists to a).
But d) they also react to other motorist’s response to a); including your own! We have recursion!
And they react to your reactions to their reactions to your reactions to a) (and so on).
And you need to be able to accurately predict what they’re going to do, in order to not hit them, or get hit by them (or get trapped in the left lane when you need to turn right, or…)
Suddenly it’s not so easy. If I wrote a computer program trying to do this, it’d quickly overflow all the memory, and maybe shut itself down (I am not a good programmer, but still). And you’re expected to be doing this. Brains are nice and all, but they overflow too, they can’t process all this real-time either.
So, here’s what you should really do. Put all of your attention into driving. Prioritize (front is more important than back, so spend more time looking there; closer things would hit you sooner than things further away, so watch them, umm, “closer” – that kind of thing). And be careful, and give other people lots of room to make decisions, and avoid sudden moves and lane-changes and distractions and all of that. Plan out where you’re going ahead of time (don’t even rely on your GPS; go over your Google Maps directions before you leave, if you need them). Also, don’t be a jerk. And don’t drive over the speed limit, things come up way too fast[1]
I think this sounds reasonable enough. Do you think so? I do.
My point: this is more than enough to concentrate on. This is why I do not talk on my cell-phone when driving, I definitely don’t text while driving, and I only manipulate CD’s while stopped. And as a general rule, I’m respectful of other drivers, and stay within what I consider a fair distance of the posted speed limits.
Other people don’t seem to get that, though.
At 5:20 on Monday, go to the nearest major road (for me, Kennedy Avenue; for you, maybe Cline or Broad, or Glen Elyn Road or North Avenue or State Street). Count how many cars you see in five minutes in which the operator is also operating a cell phone.
Cell phones distract you. They draw your attention away from the road and driving. Even with a hands-free device, you are still more distracted than you would otherwise be (I also believe that you’re more distracted than you would be while conversing with a passenger, because the passenger can also see when they should be shutting up and letting you drive, and is less likely to expect your full concentration). Texting while driving is even worse, since it distracts your attention, your vision, and at least one of your hands. So, you’re not paying attention to where you’re going, you’re not looking there, and you’re not steering all that effectively – where do you end up?
Being an idiot while driving is also bad. Talking on a cell phone is an example of it, I suppose, but there is more to it than that. Tailgating is bad; driving 25 mph over the speed limit and weaving is bad; not checking your mirrors for my car before you switch lanes is bad too (and annoying! grr!). Driving drunk… don’t even think about it, man. There are other things, too, which I’ll try to illustrate with an example. Yesterday I was driving home from Madison, and I was heading East[2] on I-90 somewhere between Rockford and Chicago (at which point it is a four-lane highway, relatively small for the Chicago area). Now, travelling above the posted speed limit of 65 mph is against the law, so I wouldn’t tell you if I was travelling at 72 mph instead, so, let’s just say I was had cruise control on at what I felt was pretty much the fastest you should be travelling on a highway anywhere, especially with a 12-year-old car that felt ready to shake itself apart if it went any faster, and that I was in the left (“fast”) lane (because I was going a little faster than the trucks and slower cars, and consider weaving and lane-switching a non-ideal, not-very-robust solution). Out of nowhere, a guy in a smallish, sporty (though oldish but not “classic”) black car zooms up behind me. I’m in the process of passing someone to my right at the moment, so he pulls up behind me, and starts tailgating. He flashed his lights a couple times, starts looking upset. I maintain my speed, because, you know, why speed up if I’m going as fast as I think I can already? I can’t move over, of course, because I’m passing someone. A couple minutes later, we’ve passed the other vehicle on the right, so my tailgater zooms into the right lane. He pulls up alongside me, looks at me (90 degrees, directly to his left, right at my face) and points (I’m guessing to the right lane, behind his car or something). He’s saying something, I couldn’t tell what (because I’d only glanced over to see). Anyway, all I actually saw of him was longish, unkempt hair; kind of gaunt face; real disreputable, pissed-off kind of guy. And then he zoomed along in front of me, and kept going. And I was upset for a while, because I didn’t actually do anything wrong, and now someone’s mad at me! Gee!
I’d like to say that, down the road, he got pulled over or in a minor accident or something, but that is not the case. I’d also like to say that that was the only time that happened, but it was not (at least two other times stick out in my memory, just along that same stretch of highway; once because it was a largish pickup truck, who was especially unfriendly with the hand-gestures and lights; another, because I thought I recognized the sedan’s driver, though this was likely mistaken).
So, yeah. Don’t be a jerk. Did you know that driving over about 60 actually decreases fuel economy in most cars? (wind resistance increases swiftly, turbulence becomes a factor, and the engine is revving higher than its fuel-efficiency peak to keep up) So, don’t do that either.
Driving places is actually very dangerous. There are dangers from environmental factors, dangers within your car, and dangers from other drivers. There are plenty of distractions already, and adding a cell-phone conversation or text on top of that is just crazy-stupid. Driving aggressively and idiotically aggravates the other things, since it gives other people less time to react and makes them angry (and therefore distracted or less attentive). So I would like to ask of you these several things: that you drive smart; that you do not use your cell-phone while driving (except, at most, to say “hey I’m driving, can you call back or wait for me to pull over?”); and that you try not to be an idiot. Most of all, remember that the other cars you see out there, are not just mindless machines. Inside each and every one of them is a human operator, with human needs and wants, human distractions, and human emotions. Don’t be a jerk to someone you don’t even know.
Thank you; I now yield the soap-box to the next lay preacher in line.
-Nick Leep III
[1]I learned in driver’s ed that, despite what the Indiana Driver’s Manual says, you should pay more attention to the residence time between you and another car (e.g. how long it takes you to get to a spot in the road they just passed) than to the actual distance. Later, when I became a chemical engineer and started doing calculations with flows and pipes, this made so much more sense, 700x or something; there’s a theoretical basis, and “advanced” mathematics to describe it, and everything (I am being a nerd now, please tell me this is ok. Or I will cry. 
)
[2]I was actually heading more South than East, but US highways have an interesting system. Highways with even numbers are East-West highways, and highways with odd numbers are North-South highways. No road is perfectly straight or perfectly lined up with the cardinal directions, of course, so this ends up being a generalization and naming convention more than a reality; even so, I’m actually a really big fan of it, even if it means heading “west” to get from 95th to 31st on the Dan Ryan.
