In preparation for an upcoming presentation to parents and students at a high school about distracted driving and texting while driving, I have put together a quiz, fourteen questions. My purpose is to improve understanding and stimulate thinking about these topics. I invite you to take it. Without apology, I will tell you that there are one or two trick questions. Answers will follow in the next post.

1. Complete this sentence: In general, “distracted driving” means __________ off the wheel, __________ off the road, or __________ off the driving situation.

2. In one or two sentences, explain what “cognitive blindness” is.

3. According to experts, if you are talking on a cellphone while driving, approximately what percentage of your brain is diverted or distracted from the traffic situation ahead of and around you?

4. True or false: Most distracted driving these days is texting, which means that distracted driving is mostly a problem for teens and drivers under age 25.

5. In either yards or feet, how far does a car travel in three seconds at 30 miles per hour, and at 60 miles per hour?

6. Explain the three steps involved in a driver avoiding an accident.

7. On average, how long does it take to compose and send a text message?

8. Based on your answers to Questions 5 and 6, explain why distracted driving is dangerous.

9. Based on your answers to Questions 5, 6, and 7, explain why texting while driving is dangerous. [Bonus: based on your answers to Questions 1, 5, 6, and 7, explain why texting is the most dangerous form of distracted driving.]

10. According to experts, how many times more dangerous (likelihood of a crash) is texting while driving than the safest driving?

a. Three times

b. Six times

c. Sixteen times

d. Twenty-three times

11. If you are licensed to drive in State A, but you are driving in State B, whose electronic device/cellphone/texting/distracted driving laws do you have to follow - your “home” state or the state in which you are driving?

12. Most electronic device/cellphone/texting/distracted driving laws apply when the car is “in motion.” If the ignition is on, but your car is stopped because your foot is on the brake, is your car in motion?

13. Is using a Global Positioning System (GPS) to help you with directions to your destination a form of distracted driving?

14. Many state laws that ban the use of electronic devices while driving exempt devices that provide “audio.” So, if you are in a state with this type of law, and while driving you are surfing the Internet on a device that is also able to play music, are you violating that law?

I am not really a science guy; I took Physics for Poets to get one of my final credits to graduate from college. One result of my ignorance on this subject was trying, after my son’s accident, to understand why cars so often skid. For quite a while , I looked for something or someone who would explain the physical sequence in terms a non-scientist could understand. I eventually found it in Tim Smith’s 2006 book Crash-Proof Your Kids (Fireside). Describing “what typically gets teens in trouble on curves,” Smith’s book (which I highly recommend) says:

[They] enter the curve from a straight stretch with a balanced car. What often happens is that they enter the curve at same speed as the straightaway, which is too fast. Then they get midway through the turn and feel the tires slip, so they hit the brakes. Pretty reasonable response, right? Actually, no. The reason the tires started to slip is that the driver is asking them to do two things at once — maintain traction and change direction — at a speed where it was impossible to accomplish both. What happened with the balance and traction of the car? When the wheel was turned left, the left side of the car dipped and the right side rose. Then, when the driver braked, it caused the center of mass to move forward and load up the front wheels, putting the majority of the downforce and traction on the left front tire. The rear tires, now with less weight. lost traction and started skidding across the road, while the car’s back end headed toward the shoulder. Experiencing this, many new drivers brake even harder, which puts even less weight on the rear tires and compounds the skid, and the car ends up spinning off the road. This happens all the time, and it’s preventable.

Except for the fact that my son overcorrected to the right, not the left, and then hit a guard rail, this paragraph seems to me to be an unfortunately precise description of his accident. Especially the preventable part.

What does this paragraph tell parents about supervising teen drivers? For one, that some aspects of driving are counterintuitive, and that to learn how to control a skidding car requires practice. This raises the obvious dilemma — how does one get a teen to practice skid control? High performance driving schools are one option, though the cost can be prohibitive for many parents. The empty high school parking lot on Sunday morning might be possible, though the drawbacks of doing so are plain. Also, teaching skid control is obviously a two-edged sword — do we want teen drivers to feel as though they will be able to handle the car if it skids? Does teaching skid control promote more dangerous driving? It might.

I am sure that many driving instructors would take the position that skid control practice in a vacant parking lot is an important skill to learn, and that the benefits of knowing how to respond — at least being trained in the counterintuitiveness of the response — outweighs the risks of encouraging dangerous driving behavior. But I would offer this more conservative perspective: the physics of skids, as Tim Smith so aptly describes it, illustrates three parts of my mantra that There Is No Such Thing As a Safe Teen Driver. As Smith notes, skids are a common occurrence in driving. Preventable, but common. Thus, when we put teen drivers on the road, we hope that they will be sensible enough to avoid the circumstances and places where skids are likely to occur, but there are two other possibilities - they have been taught how to respond to skids, which induces them to assume that they can handle a skid and thus can take more risks, or they have not been taught how to respond, in which case they are at considerable risk of veering of the road. The realities of skidding also illustrate the truism that it takes years of experience to create a safe driver, not the 20-50 hours that states require for teens to be licensed. Finally, the ever-lurking problem of skidding is most likely to arise - as it did in Reid’s case — when a teen drives on an unfamiliar road and goes into a turn that comes up suddenly, causing a quick pull to the right or left, which then starts the off-the-road sequence.

In summary, skidding is part of driving, skid control is an elusive and double-edged element of driver training for teens, and this phenomenon is yet another reason for parents to work with their teens, every time the teens get behind the wheel, to map out the route and consider whether there will be sudden curves that might result in a skid, and to avoid such spots if at all possible.

Parents’ final thought on this topic should be the recognition that there are no good answers, only degrees of risk.

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.