Driving while distracted

I’ll admit to feeling a bit cocky going into the distracted driving shoot for TechKnow, in which co-contributor Kosta Grammatis and I were pitted against one another in simulators and on-the-road tests. Who could better handle driving while subjected to various outside stimuli and distractions? The answer seemed obvious – at least to me.

Not only did I have extensive training and lots of practice driving while distracted for the CIA, I continue to use those skills every day – spending hours on the road doing what I call “driving while mom.”

In CIA training, we had a two-week course, affectionately referred to as Crash and Burn, during which we practiced handling ourselves under a variety of intimidating – sometimes downright harrowing – driving conditions and circumstances. We were timed speeding around a racetrack at the CIA’s training facility known as The Farm, swerving around obstacles in our path. We had to learn to weave through cones in reverse, without ever turning around. And we practiced crashing through barriers like two parked cars and peeling out to escape. We even did some driving while blindfolded! (Let it be known that I was awarded “Most Improved” status at the end of Crash and Burn.)

Later, in the field, much of my life as an operative was spent behind the wheel – hours conducting what are called Surveillance Detection Routes to determine if I was being followed; traveling from one remote backwater to another along unlit mountainous roads; and also conducting agent meetings – debriefing sources that is – often while in the driver’s seat.

To be honest though, CIA training and experience pales in comparison to the distractions I’m subjected to while driving nowadays – kids in the backseat clamoring for music, juice boxes, snacks, bathroom breaks, or just plain attention. When the kids are not in car, I typically use my driving time to take care of all manner of personal and professional business. Always careful to use a hands-free device, I nonetheless make doctors’ appointments, conduct interviews, line up babysitters, or just catch up with friends and family. Both my parents know that when they hear from me, it usually means I’m driving somewhere.

The distracted driving story changed all that for me. Not only was I humbled to learn – after a variety of simulator and road tests – that I am no better a driver than Kosta, I also discovered that I’m far from the able multi-tasker I’d always imagined myself to be. In fact, Kosta’s and my performance in several tests that measured our capacity to multi-task while driving bore out the findings of University of Utah researchers that none of us is really capable of focusing on more than one thing at a time.

Even hands free distractions – like talking to Siri or having a cellphone conversation with one’s mother – are just as potentially dangerous as, say, driving while drunk. And who among us hasn't been guilty of at one time responding to what seemed like an urgent text while driving? 

That statistic, and the realization of my own limitations has caused me to change my behavior altogether. I now have an app on my iPhone that essentially saves me from myself. It will respond to incoming texts with a message that tells the contact that I’m driving and unavailable. There are many similar apps and also innovations being developed to monitor a driver for distractedness or drowsiness. 

I went into this shoot with Kosta driven (pun intended) by my competitive spirit and a desire to prove that, research be damned, I could “do it all” while driving. But the only thing I won this time was a greater understanding of just how distracting doing anything but focusing on the road is, and just how dangerous losing that focus could be. Simply put: in the world of distracted driving, there simply are no winners.