Survive The Drive Obooko

SURVIVE the DRIVE
A GUIDE TO KEEPING EVERYONE

ON THE ROAD ALIVE
Tom Dingus
\
with Mindy Buchanan-King
SECOND EDITION
Driving is risky business. Only cancer, heart attacks, and
strokes cause more unintentional deaths among the
general population. In this book Tom Dingus, one of the
foremost authorities on driving safety, tells you how to
reduce your risk of accident while on the road. Dingus
directs the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI),
which is home to the largest group of driving safety
researchers in the world. In Survive the Drive he brings
together decades of transportation safety research with
personal anecdotes from his own time behind the wheel
to create an entertaining guide that gives you all of the
information you need to keep yourself and those around
you safe on the road.
Tom Dingus has been conducting transportation safety research

for more than 35 years. As Director of VTTI, he and his team of
researchers and engineers pioneered the naturalistic driving
study research method, and they are working to ensure the safe
development and deployment of the next generation of vehicular
technology.
Mindy Buchanan-King is a project associate at VTTI. For the past

11 years, she has turned “engineer-speak” into impactful articles
and award-winning publications.
Cover design: Alex Parrish

ISBN 9781949373257
90000 >
Published by the Virginia Tech

Transportation Institute in association
with Virginia Tech Publishing 9 781949 373257
Survive the Drive
Survive the Drive
A Guide to Keeping Everyone on the Road Alive
2nd Edition
Tom Dingus
With Mindy Buchanan-King
V irginia T ech T r ansportation I nstitute

in A ssociation W ith
B lacksburg , V irginia
First Edition Copyright © 2015 Tom Dingus
Second Edition Copyright © 2020 Tom Dingus
Second edition first published 2020 by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in association with
Virginia Tech Publishing
Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

3500 Transportation Research Plaza
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Virginia Tech Publishing

Virginia Tech University Libraries
560 Drillfield Drive
Blacksburg, VA 24061
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licens-
es/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, California,
94042, USA.
Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners, but the authors would
be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to their attention so that corrections may be
published in future editions.
Series enumeration supplied by publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-949373-24-0 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-949373-25-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-949373-26-4 (pdf)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/survive-the-drive/
Cover art by Alex Parrish
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiv
Abbreviations xv
1. Physics 101 1
2. Simple Ways to Reduce Your Risk 6
3. Defensive Driving 101 24
4. Adapt, Overcome, and Survive 43
5. Do Not Mix Mind-Altering Substances with Driving 56
6. Be Attentive and Alert 65
7. Aggressive Driving 101 82
8. Teaching Your Teen to Drive 91
9. Senior Drivers 105
10. Motorcycles and a Few Tips for Those Who Ride Them 110
11. The Future of Transportation, Part I 119
12. The Future of Transportation, Part II 126
13. The Future of Transportation, Part III 142
Final Thoughts 147
References 151
Illustration Credits 165
About the Authors 169

Preface
Driving is risky business. Only cancer, heart attacks, and strokes cause more
unintentional deaths among the general population. Driving is the leading
cause of unintentional death for those between the ages of 4 and 34.
Unlike cancer, heart attacks, and strokes, driving does not discriminate by
age. More than 37,000 deaths occur each year from crashes on US highways.
Many of these crash victims are teenagers or young adults according to
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis
Reporting System (commonly referred to in our industry as FARS). In fact, all
you have to do is look at the 2016 NHTSA Summary of Motor Vehicle Crashes
fact sheet—which is based on FARS information—for a sobering reminder of
the risks that drivers face, from more than 3.14 million injuries sustained dur-
ing the year to nearly 11,000 fatalities due to alcohol-impaired driving.
Maybe the risk of experiencing a fatal or disabling crash looks, relatively

speaking, pretty low. After all, there are more than 320 million people in
the US alone, 225 million of whom are licensed drivers. Let’s put your crash
risk into perspective, though: by far, more people die from driving than from
many of the recreational activities we think of as “dangerous.” The rates in
the table below have been corrected for the number of participants.
Fatality rate, per 100,000 participants
Skiing/snowboarding 0.4
Hunting 0.7
White-water kayaking 2.9
Ice, snow, or rock climbing 3.2
Scuba diving 3.5
Recreational boating 6.5
Driving 15.2
As the numbers show, you are much more likely to die in a car crash than you
are to die participating in any of the other activities that may be character-
ized as “extreme” or “risky.” Take, for instance, white-water kayaking. Out of
| vii
100,000 folks who kayak, an average of 2.9 people die in a given year while
kayaking. What this tells us is that our perception of risk is not very accurate
when it comes to driving.
There’s another important takeaway from these statistics. Why do you think
that driving and recreational boating top the list? Well, one big factor is alco-
hol (a topic for later), which gets back to the risk-perception issue. Ask your-
self, How many people ice climb or scuba dive drunk? Not very many. Why?
Because participants in these sports understand (and estimate pretty well)
the risks. Driving is risky too, but we aren’t very good at assessing that risk.
But if we understand the risk and learn how to reduce that risk, we can
increase our odds of survival a great deal.
Understanding Your Risk: An Easy Math Lesson

Throughout the book I will be giving you estimates of the odds associated
with certain aspects of driving—aspects ranging from distraction (think tex-
ting) to driving under the influence of alcohol. The concept of “odds” is not
difficult to grasp. In essence, odds are the likelihood—or risk—of something
happening. For our purposes, that something is a crash, and most often the
odds I give you will tell you how much risk you face of being in a crash under
certain conditions (whatever those conditions might be) compared to the
ideal conditions of driving on dry roads in daylight while alert, attentive, and
unimpaired (sober). If the odds I give you are not based on that comparison, I
will let you know. Therefore, if I tell you that your odds of being in a crash are
1.0, this means that you would have exactly the same risk if you were driving
under the ideal circumstances described above. If the odds are 1.3, you are
about 30 percent more likely to crash than if you were driving under ideal
conditions; if the odds are 2.0, then you are twice as likely to crash; if the
odds are 6.0, then you are six times, or 600 percent, as likely to crash, and so
on.
I bring up the distinction between percentages and odds because people,

including the media, often confuse them. For example, the Virginia Tech
Transportation Institute (VTTI), of which I am director, did an analysis that
showed texting and driving for heavy-truck drivers increased the risk of a
safety-critical event (that is, a crash, near crash, minor collision, etc.) by 23
times. Unfortunately, some media sources then erroneously reported that
viii | Survive the Drive

texting while driving increases your risk by 23 percent. That is a huge dif-
ference between our study results and what was reported. A few key points
got lost in translation: (1) the 23-times statistic applies to heavy trucks, not
to all vehicles, and (2) the increased crash risk in terms of percentages is not
23 percent; it is 2,300 percent! Sometimes throughout this book, I have to
use percentages to explain the risk because I don’t have strong enough data
to calculate the odds. For example, you need numbers like how many people
didn’t crash while driving on icy roads to calculate the odds of crashing on
ice, which is sometimes hard to pinpoint. Therefore, you will see statements
such as “increases fatal crash risk by 60 percent.” Just remember that this
number is not exactly the same as odds of 1.6. In general terms, though, the
two convey roughly the same amount of risk.
There are times that the odds can be less than 1.0. In these cases, there exists
what we refer to as a “protective effect.” In other words, you have reduced
your odds of a crash. A great example is the presence of passengers. If you
are an adult (we will talk about teens later), the odds of you having a crash
are about 0.5 when you are traveling with passengers relative to when you
drive alone. Therefore, as an adult, you are twice as safe when passengers
are present. We are not exactly sure why there is a reduced risk of a crash
in this scenario, but a few factors are certainly at play. First, adults tend
to drive more conservatively when passengers are present. Second, passen-
gers probably help keep the driver alert. And third, the passengers serve as
another set of eyes to spot hazards. My wife is a very good “crash avoidance
system” in this regard, letting me know in no uncertain terms when I have
missed or underestimated a potential hazard.
When I assess the risk of a crash in terms of odds or percentages, I am

usually drawing on scientific research. Most of the time there are scientific
papers or reports to back up the risk odds or percentages, either written by
myself or with coauthors or by esteemed colleagues in the field. (References
to such research are found at the end of the book, should you want to delve
into the scientific details.) In cases where the published research may be thin
or inadequate, I will estimate odds or percentages based on my own exper-
tise gained from more than 35 years of research experience in the field. I
am providing odds and percentage estimates so that you can understand the
crash risks and decide accordingly how best to reduce your personal odds
and those of your kids, parents, friends, or spouse. My hope, of course, is that
Preface | ix
you will heed the advice in this book so that your odds of suffering a serious
crash will be cut in half.
The Data Used

The odds and percentages provided throughout this book are almost exclu-
sively based on studies conducted in actual field settings or come from data-
bases derived from actual crashes. While laboratory and simulation studies
have their benefits, the very fact that they take place in closed environments
limits our ability to estimate crash risk from them. There are several large
crash databases that are developed and stored by NHTSA. The sources of
these data are primarily police reports filled out by investigating officers
after a crash. Other databases are developed through more in-depth analy-
ses conducted by trained crash investigators. These databases are powerful
tools that help us understand much about crash factors, and they are refer-
enced throughout this book.
What is very hard, or sometimes even impossible, to gauge using post-crash

investigations is what happened in the seconds leading up to a crash. This
timeframe is critical for determining such factors as driver drowsiness, dis-
traction, error, aggressive driving, and road conditions. Crash investigation
reports are only as good as the information collected by the investigator, and
the majority of that information comes from interviewing those involved in
the crash. However, following a crash, drivers and passengers may be dead,
injured, or dazed or may not have been looking in the right direction, may
not remember what occurred, or may be trying to hide something. This is
why VTTI developed the naturalistic driving study research method some 20
years ago.
In the late 1990s I began collaborating with a friend and colleague named
Mike Goodman from NHTSA on what would become the first large-scale
naturalistic driving study. The study used 100 cars traveling on the road for
13 months. A brilliant team of VTTI hardware and software engineers and fel-
low researchers helped us create and define the concept behind naturalis-
tic driving studies. We determined that we needed more real-world data to
explain why people crashed. We needed data from the vehicles themselves
to determine what was happening at the time of a safety-critical event—that
is, a crash, near crash, minor collision, etc. We also needed video to corrob-
x | Survive the Drive

orate what was happening with the vehicle. For instance, if the car experi-
enced a sudden deceleration, we needed visuals to determine why the driver
slammed on the brakes. Was the driver distracted? Fatigued? Impaired?
To solve this problem, we developed special instrumentation (including an
inconspicuous suite of cameras, sensors, and radar) along with increasingly
sophisticated data acquisition systems (DASs). Andy Petersen and his team at
the Center for Technology Development design and build all the DASs used
in VTTI naturalistic driving studies.
The “naturalistic driving study research method” was pioneered some 20 years ago by
VTTI. A VTTI-developed data acquisition system, dubbed the MiniDAS.
Only volunteers are used for our naturalistic driving studies; they receive
no training and no directions from VTTI researchers. Their only task is to
drive as they normally do. For nearly two decades, we have equipped more
than 4,000 vehicles to collect what now stands at more than 2,000,000 hours
of continuous naturalistic driving data. We have also captured nearly 2,000
crashes (and counting) and more than 10,000 near crashes as part of this
data-acquisition effort. This unique data resource is continually tapped by
federal transportation agencies, departments of transportation, even major
automobile manufacturers and suppliers. It is the cornerstone of our pri-
mary goal at VTTI: to save lives.
One more point about odds. You will notice that none of the odds you see in
this book are zero. Even when you have done everything you can to be safer
Preface | xi
or to create a protective effect (that is, create an environment where your
odds of being in a crash are less than 1.0), you are still at some risk.
An example screenshot illustrating the camera views captured by our data acquisition
systems.
The only way to eliminate your odds of being killed or injured in a crash while
driving is to not drive! This is the concept of exposure. If you drive less, take
public transit more, drive in better weather, and drive on safer roads, you
reduce your risk by reducing your exposure. This will be an important con-
cept throughout this book, and it is something that you should consider as
you decide whether—and how—to get from point A to point B. There are a few
simple alternative ways to reduce your exposure and the exposure of others
without having to stay home all the time:
1. Get out of the driver’s seat and save the planet while saving yourself.
One way to manage your risk is to take more public transit. A transit
bus is safer than a car. They have significant mass; they are easy to see;
and in most cases they are operated by alert, sober, and attentive dri-
vers. It is a rare event when a driver of this type of heavy vehicle falls
asleep at the wheel or is distracted to the point of causing a crash
involving many people.
xii | Survive the Drive

2. Put your kids on the school bus, go home, and have another cup of coffee.
From a transportation perspective, there really are fewer places safer
for your kids than a school bus. School buses have large mass; they are
very noticeable given that they are giant orange vehicles that feature
flashing lights; and like all buses, they are almost always operated by
trained, sober, and reasonably alert drivers. Having said that, it is
important to reinforce with your kids how to enter and exit the bus,
because these are the moments when almost all the risks occur for kids
on school buses.
From this point forward, you will never see me use the word accident again
in the book. I used to charge students in my transportation safety course 25
cents every time they uttered the word in class. By the end of the semester,
we had enough money for pizza. Why did I put them through this? Because
accident implies an unfortunate event that can’t be controlled or managed;
an accident is something that just happens. However, as you will read in this
book, you have significant control over your risk while driving. If these risks
are properly managed, you can avoid many, many crashes. You also have
the capability to manage the potential consequences for those cases during
which a crash cannot be avoided. For instance, you can choose a safe vehi-
cle, wear personal protective gear that includes a seat belt, or wear a bicycle
or motorcycle helmet if you are of the two- or three-wheel crowd. All these
choices affect how a crash will impact your life, or how the impact will crash
your life, as the case may be.
So, read on and learn how to best control your driving situation, manage
your risk, and avoid or lessen the probability or severity of a crash! But keep
in mind that crashes do happen—about 11 million per year in the United
States. Even if you do everything right, you may get in a crash. Therefore, it
is just as important to make sure that if someone crashes into you, you have
done everything you can not only to survive but to walk away.
Preface | xiii
Acknowledgments
I have been extremely fortunate. I have a great and supportive family that
appears in numerous stories within these pages. I have wonderful friends
who are like family, great colleagues and mentors who are some of my best
friends, and students who have been my best teachers. The greatest part,
though, is that most of them—and, certainly, all the ones who appear in this
book—fall in at least two of those categories. We have been on a long journey
together, sometimes deliberate and sometimes random, and that journey has
allowed us to do a great thing: save people from needless injury and death
due to car crashes. How could a life and a life’s work be any better than that?
xiv | Survive the Drive

Abbreviations
AAA American Automobile Association
ABS anti-lock brake systems
AEB automatic emergency braking
BAC blood alcohol content
CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
DAS data acquisition system
ESC electronic stability control
FARS Fatality Analysis Reporting System
FHWA Federal Highway Administration
FMCSA Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
GDL graduated driver’s licensing
IIHS Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
NHTSA National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
NIH National Institutes of Health
SAE Society for Automotive Engineers
VTTI Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
| xv
1. Physics 101
Know Your Car and Your Options
The very first lesson to remember while driving is that roadways are full
of objects of unusual size and weight (mass) moving at high rates of speed
(acceleration). This can create tremendous forces, particularly in a crash. If
you took physics in high school, this is what your physics teacher tried to
teach you:
Force = Mass x Acceleration, or F = MA.
Roadways are full of objects of varying mass traveling at high rates of speed. In a
potential crash situation, it is always better to be in a vehicle of high rather than low
mass.
What does this mean? Well, if you want to increase your chances of survival
during a crash, slower speeds are better (although, as I will discuss later,
going too slow can also create force in a crash). Avoiding objects of increased
mass will also reduce the potential for high forces and lessen the severity of
crashes. The easiest lesson to learn here is to stay away from trucks … unless,
| 1
of course, you are a truck driver. We’ll talk in more detail about this point
later because I can’t emphasize it enough.
A side note to the F = MA lesson is that it is always better to be on the

high-mass side rather than the low-mass side of any crash. Therefore, if you
find yourself in a crash situation, you want to be the one exerting most of
the force as opposed to absorbing most of the force. Think of a head-on
crash between a locomotive and a car traveling at equal speeds. While the
train engineer will barely feel the impact, the car driver will certainly feel the
impact.
Based on this lesson, here are two thoughts to bear in mind when choosing
a vehicle:
1. If you have a choice, go with the bigger car. I hesitate to say this, but all
things considered, the bigger the car, the more likely you are to survive
a serious crash. Of course, there are a lot of practical trade-offs to this
alternative, including increased cost for gas and a substantial negative
environmental impact. Be that as it may, big cars generally help you
survive a crash more effectively than small cars because they weigh
more and typically sit up higher so that more of the forces are trans-
mitted through the body of the car.
2. Newer is better. Despite what I just said about mass (that is, the bigger,
the better), the newer the car, the safer the car. And in general the
more expensive the car model, the safer the car. If you find yourself
saying, “Wow, rich people have the capability to be safer than poor peo-
ple,” you are absolutely (and unfortunately) right. However, there is
good news. Unlike many aspects of income inequality, the gap regard-
ing the ability to purchase a safe car has been narrowing for a number
of years. In fact, newer low-cost cars can be very safe. The key is to
look at the government safety ratings, but be aware that the scales are
different for different-sized cars (mass!). Therefore, I recommend that
you put yourself and your family in the safest car that you can, given all
the trade-offs above.
Our friends at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) conduct
studies periodically that determine the number of fatal crashes per million
vehicles of a particular model on the road. These studies include a variety
of makes and models. Recent IIHS studies have found that new vehicles are
2 | Survive the Drive

improving greatly in crashworthiness and even crash-avoidance technology,
with fatality rates overall dropping with each model year. With the informa-
tion above, you can guess which kinds of vehicles are generally the safest:
those that are bigger and heavier and newer with more safety features. Vehi-
cles that sit up higher also translate to increased safety because most, if not
all, of the force will be transmitted through the entire body in this type of
vehicle, regardless of the height of whatever you hit. What this all means is
that SUVs dominate the list, with a minivan or two sprinkled in. At the bot-
tom of the list are compacts and subcompacts, even those that received a
five-star safety rating from IIHS.
This is all good information, and you should pay attention to it. However, you
should be careful in how you interpret the results. For example, the “best”
vehicles are generally not those driven by younger drivers, are not purchased
by car enthusiasts because they are bigger, and tend to be used more by fam-
ilies. Thus, they are driven by folks who aren’t as likely to crash. It should also
be noted that the IIHS data are not corrected for miles driven. For example,
if you drive a lot of miles, you may tend to drive a smaller, more fuel-efficient
car.
Despite the limitations of the IIHS data, the underlying trends are undeni-
able. For example, 11 of the vehicles listed under the 2014 model year cate-
gory of the IIHS results had zero fatalities per million vehicles on the road.
Even 10 years ago, there wasn’t one vehicle on that list with a zero fatality
rating per million vehicles.
However, don’t be overconfident! Before you purchase one of these vehicles

and start feeling invincible on the road, keep in mind that, according to
NHTSA, the crash fatality rate increased in the US in 2012 for the first time in
a number of years and then again in 2015 and 2016. In other words, we have
a long way to go till driving fatalities seriously approach zero. Therefore, it’s
imperative to keep reading this book!
Safety Factors beyond Weight … and My 1971 VW Bus

The modern car is an amazing feat of engineering. In addition to the obvious
performance and luxury features, newer vehicles are designed to transmit
the force of a crash around the passenger compartment and provide “landing
Physics 101 | 3
surfaces” (airbags). Everything from collapsible steering columns to shatter-
proof glass, crumple zones, seat belt tensioners, and up to 11 airbags make
the cars of today much, much safer than cars of even the recent past. All
these factors minimize the damage to drivers and passengers. This ability to
essentially protect the driver and passengers during a crash is known as the
vehicle’s crashworthiness.
By contrast, let’s consider my 1971 VW bus. While driving my bus, my feet

were essentially inches away from the front bumper. My midsection was
mere inches from the steering wheel. The only redeeming fact in that regard
was that the wheel made for a great place to hang on in a rollover crash. If
you drove this bus and were concerned about crashworthiness, you mounted
the spare tire on the front to provide more cushion in case of a frontal colli-
sion. There were no airbags, no door impact beams, and no heat to speak of.
Horsepower in these vehicles was pretty nonexistent, which is probably why
many of us of a certain generation are still alive today.
Cars have come a long way from the VWs I owned in the 1970s.

Since my ’71 VW, cars have come a long way and vary significantly. We’ve
talked about size and weight changes, but there are also pretty big differ-
ences between makes and models of the same relative weight and the same
year of manufacture. Do yourself and your family a favor and look at the
NHTSA 5-Star Safety Ratings and the IIHS Top Safety ratings. With these
resources you can find plenty of helpful information about the crashworthi-
ness of almost any car—new or used—that you may want to buy.
I was fortunate enough to be able to buy my kids newer cars. (Technically,

I paid half and they paid the other half with money they saved or received
over the years, primarily from their grandparents.) I told them they could get
any car they wanted, as long as it was a Honda Civic. There are plenty of
good choices out there, and while the Civic doesn’t have a lot of mass, it does
consistently have high safety ratings from both NHTSA and IIHS. The Civic
is also reliable, environmentally friendly, economical, and relatively inexpen-
sive, and it holds its value. It has a full complement of airbags, low horse-
power (important!), and a feature I really like: the seat belt reminder never
quits. In other words, the car pings a warning every mile forever and ever if
you don’t wear your seat belt. I essentially knew that my kids would always
be belted.
My son, Chris, just recently sold his 2007 Civic with more than 150,000 miles
on it, and my daughter, Emily, no longer has her 2008 Civic. After my wife
and I sent Emily away to college, we went on a month-long trip to Australia
and New Zealand to give some lectures about distracted driving. While we
were gone, Emily came home from college during Labor Day to see friends.
On her way back to college, she was driving in a torrential rainstorm (1.5
inches per hour), hydroplaned at the bottom of a big hill, spun around at
highway speeds, and hit the guardrail. Three airbags deployed; she hit her
head on the front airbag and the side-curtain airbag hard enough to break
her glasses and suffer a concussion. I got a call in New Zealand at 4:00 a.m.
that started with the words “Don’t freak out.”
What do you think would have happened had she not had a car with airbags?
Or if she had been unbelted and out of her normal driving position when
the airbags deployed? The potential was certainly there for permanent brain
injury, or worse. Then I really would have freaked out.
Physics 101 | 5
2. Simple Ways to Reduce Your
Risk
Sound bites are one of the banes of modern life. This seems to be particularly
true when it comes to driving safety. You often hear news reports that claim
one cause for a crash, such as, “A driver, under the influence of alcohol,
hit a cyclist.” However, crashes themselves—and the degree to which those
involved are injured—are rarely the result of a single factor. Inevitably, there
are several contributing factors at play: the driver may have been using a
cell phone, the crash may have occurred at night, the cyclist may have been
wearing dark clothing with minimal or no reflectors, and/or the driver may
have had a blood alcohol content below the legal limit. These multiple fac-
tors are known as the interaction between causal (primary) and contributing
(secondary) factors.
How a Crash Is Like Baking a Cake

One thing you will notice as you read this book is that if you add up all the
percentages of crash risk factors (such as alcohol, distracted driving, aggres-
sive driving, drowsy driving), you will be way over 100 percent. You may won-
der how this can be. It’s because three or four factors often interact to cause
a single crash.
One can think about this phenomenon like a recipe—let’s say it’s a recipe for
a birthday cake. Each ingredient in this figurative birthday cake represents a
factor that can contribute to a crash. A crash happens when all the ingredi-
ents are present to complete the “mix.” Sometimes, one or two ingredients
are missing, so you can’t make the cake. One real-world example of a key
ingredient is the act of taking your eyes off of the road to glance at some-
thing, otherwise known as distracted driving.
Distraction becomes the key ingredient in this scenario. But if one or more
other ingredients aren’t present—say, the car in front of you doesn’t brake
unexpectedly while you are distracted—then a crash won’t occur. It’s when
you have three or four factors working against you while driving that you

typically have a crash. Therefore, one way to think about how to avoid
crashes is to make sure that you keep one or more of the key ingredients, like
distraction, out of the cake recipe.
Crashes are not usually caused by a single factor; they happen when multiple factors are
present to complete the “mix,” like ingredients in a birthday cake.
In addition to the crash’s causal and contributing factors, there are other
ingredients that determine whether you are injured and to what extent. Let’s
think of these ingredients as the proverbial icing on the cake. These ingre-
dients include such factors as how well your vehicle is designed to protect
you during a crash (also known as crashworthiness), whether or not you’re
wearing a seat belt, and the presence of heavy, loose objects in the vehicle
that could become dangerous projectiles during a crash.
The following is an example from my own history to illustrate this recipe

simile.
My friend Rick left our home in Fairborn, Ohio, after graduating from Wright
State University to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. During Rick’s semester break, our friend Bob, (another)
Rick, and I hopped into my 1973 VW bus (not to be confused with my ’71 VW
bus) and headed bravely across Indiana to visit him and check out this town
Simple Ways to Reduce Your Risk | 7

in Illinois. How can you go wrong when your college buddy moves to a town
called Champaign?
As we were known to do, we had a spirited weekend—all the while, something

called the Blizzard of ’78 started happening right outside our door. Of course,
we barely noticed the blizzard. When the end of the weekend arrived, we
managed to dig out the bus and start the return trip east, moving at a snail’s
pace because of the snow. My bus had a terrible heater, so Bob brought along
a portable propane heater. Rick was sitting cross-legged with his shoes off.
In the back of the bus (which, of course, had no trunk) we had stashed several
unopened cases of beer and bottles of liquor that we had bought in Illinois.
(Hey, it was cheaper there.)
Driving in snow and ice requires that we adapt accordingly to avoid losing control of
our cars, as happened on this Alabama road in 2017.
As we traveled along, moving out of Illinois and into Indiana, the road con-
ditions slowly improved. Our speed gradually crept from 25 mph to 35 mph,
45 mph, and eventually 55 mph because the roads were plowed and salted. I
was in a hurry to get home because I had a busy week of tests and studying
ahead. We were feeling really good about the trip back home … until we
passed under an overpass that also happened to be a county line. It turned

out that the roads in Indiana were maintained county by county. Unfortu-
nately, the county into which we had crossed had not yet extended its road
maintenance onto I-70.
As we crossed the line, the interstate was covered in sheer ice. Cars were
scattered everywhere in both ditches. Our VW bus didn’t fare any better. We
started slipping and spun around backwards. My friend Rick said the most
intelligent thing I had heard in a while: “Hold on!” We hit the median and the
bus rolled over 1.75 times. I had a death grip on the steering wheel because
we didn’t have seat belts on. I distinctly remember the windshield popping
out on the first rollover. Bob wrestled a time or two with his heater.
Hydroplaning is tested at the VTTI-affiliated Global Center for Automotive Performance

Simulation (GCAPS).
When it was all over, my bus looked like an A-frame. There were broken beer
bottles everywhere, and we were soaked in beer. It was 20 degrees outside.
Rick had a chipped tooth and never found his shoes. Bob had a cut over his
eye, but that was (thankfully) the extent of the bodily damage incurred. No
one was cut from all the broken glass. There was one unbroken bottle, a
fifth of Jack Daniel’s, which had flown between Rick and me and through the
windshield, landing about 20 feet in front of the bus. Cars going the opposite
way had already pulled over, and a state patrolman followed almost instantly.
We grabbed our duffel bags. I talked to the patrolman, who was very sympa-

thetic even though I was soaked in beer, probably because it was 9:30 a.m.
and he had likely received 20 other calls about more crashes on the inter-
state. I filled out the paperwork, the officer called a tow truck, and he gave
us a ride to the Greyhound bus station. We had a couple of hours to wait for
our bus, which gave me plenty of time to think about what we had just been
through. I remember saying to Bob, “Man, I almost killed us.” To which he
replied, “But you didn’t. We got lucky.” I repeated what I had just said, and he
just grabbed my shoulder and handed me the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. By the
time we got back to Ohio, the Jack Daniel’s was gone.
From that point on, every time Rick’s dad saw me, he asked, “You keepin’ the
shiny side up these days?” “Keeping the shiny side up” meant keeping my
vehicle right-side up, which was his way of asking if I was staying safe. All in
all, the incident was a perfect example of my cake metaphor. All the ingre-
dients were present to make the cake: terrible roads; unexpected black ice;
an overconfident, young male driver; crashworthiness and vehicle handling
near zero; and heavy, loose, dangerous objects. One more ingredient—such
as a bottle flying in the wrong place; our vehicle encountering a guardrail,
another car, or a steep embankment; or our bus crossing over into oncoming
traffic—and I wouldn’t be writing this book.
What would have helped us in our situation? For starters, our heavy, dan-
gerous objects could have been securely stowed (or placed in a trunk if the
vehicle had one). We could have traveled in a vehicle with a lower center
of gravity and better heat. We definitely should have been wearing our seat
belts. The county in which the crash occurred could have implemented bet-
ter road maintenance or warnings. Most of all, though, I needed to better
understand the risks I faced as a driver and to adapt to the conditions appro-
priately. When driving, you definitely don’t want to have your cake and eat it
too.
Now for a few simple tips to reduce your risk while driving. While they may
seem like no-brainers, they can easily be forgotten in the routine of daily dri-
ving. Remembering to heed them might just ensure that at least one of the
basic ingredients of a crash is missing so that the proverbial cake never gets
made.

Seat Belts: They May Seem Like a Nuisance, but Wear Them
Anyway!
Crashes can be exceptionally violent events with tremendous accelerations
and forces applied in virtually any direction. However, the good news is that
you have seat belts. This can’t be stressed enough: there is no better option
to protect yourself in a crash than to wear a seat belt. We have all heard it for
years, but the following are facts:
• You double your odds (odds = 2.0) of an injury or fatality in a crash if

you aren’t wearing a seat belt.
• For a head-on crash, of which there are approximately 10,000 each
year, you are five times more likely to walk away without a serious
injury or fatality if you have an airbag and are wearing a seat belt.
Essentially, your odds are 0.2 if you are involved in a head-on crash but have
an airbag and wear your seat belt. That’s a tremendous protective effect.
However, the and part is important. Airbags can actually cause injuries in
crashes in which the driver is unbelted and out of the normal driving posi-
tion. And let’s face it—airbags aren’t going to be much help if a driver is
unbelted and is ejected out of his or her vehicle during a rollover crash.
The good news is that most of us wear seat belts, and the number of those
wearing seat belts in the US is increasing each year. The national seat belt
use rate is about 90 percent. According to 2017 statistics, Georgia wins the
driving safety award for the highest seat belt use within the US with a rate of
97.1 percent. New Hampshire has the lowest rate, 67.6 percent, which makes
sense, as it is the one state that has no seat belt law (think Live Free and Die
… whoops, I mean Live Free or Die).
In big round numbers, the seat belt use rate is about 5 percent lower for
males (testosterone enables them to fend off the impact of airbags), 14 per-
cent lower for rural states (which is ironic since rollover crashes are more
common in such locations), and 9 percent lower for states with secondary
seat belt laws (that is, you can’t get pulled over just because you’re not wear-
ing your seat belt) or no seat belt law at all (New Hampshire).
Another good reason to wear a seat belt was demonstrated by my friend Rick.
I was driving my ’71 VW bus one evening on the way to buy beer. Rick was

sitting sideways in the passenger seat, leaning against his door. As I made a
sweeping left-hand turn through the near-empty parking lot, the passenger-
side door popped open and Rick flew out, did a backwards roll, and landed
on his feet. Luckily, he only ended up with a few minor bruises. He had been
holding a glass bottle in his hand when he fell out of the car, and what was
left of the bottle was still in his hand.
Here is some cheap, but effective, advice regarding seat belt use: if you are
a lawmaker, pass a primary seat belt law for both front- and rear-seat occu-
pants if your state doesn’t have such a law. You will save a lot of lives and be
a hero, honest. If you are a police officer or supervisor of police officers, the
enforcement of whatever laws are on the books helps significantly. I know it
is a hard law to enforce, but there are ways to do it. Hawaii or Georgia may
be good places to look for ideas since they have higher compliance rates.
Pay Special Attention to the Kids—They Need You

My wife Melissa and I were driving around town a few years ago. Melissa and
I met in graduate school, and we both continue to work at VTTI in driving
safety. On this particular day we pulled up to a stoplight, and beside us was
a pickup truck with what appeared to be a four-year-old child standing in
the front passenger seat and leaning over the dashboard. It was all I could do
to keep Melissa from jumping out of the car, running over, and “educating”
the driver (in live traffic) about the dangers of not having your kid restrained
properly. If a relatively minor (non-injurious) front-end crash had occurred
or if a rear-end crash had happened in which a car hit the stopped pickup
from behind and forced the pickup to hit a vehicle in front, the passenger-
side airbag would have deployed. In such a case, the kid could have easily
been killed—maybe even launched through the back window—in a situation
where no injury should have occurred.
When it comes to the children in your lives, child passenger safety laws vary
state by state (AAA has some good resources about laws across each state
in the US; see References at the end of this book for more information). You
would think buckling up your child when going for a drive would be a no-
brainer nowadays, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
recently reported that in a one-year span more than 618,000 children aged
0–12 used no safety/booster seat or seat belt at least some of the time while

riding. Of those aged 12 and younger who died in a crash, 35 percent were
unrestrained.
It is sad that this has to be written, but make sure your child is safely
restrained in a vehicle—in any vehicle, not just yours. We know at VTTI that
rideshare services like Uber and Lyft are popular, so some of our researchers
looked at child safety-seat use with such services. Data analysis results
based on focus groups of parent riders and rideshare drivers found that
only one-half of parents currently provide a personal safety seat while using
a rideshare service, though most parents said they would feel comfortable
using the service with their child if the company provided a child safety
seat and the driver had basic training in child passenger safety. Overall,
most rideshare drivers and parent riders believe child passenger safety laws
should apply to rideshare services, yet regulations can be very ambiguous.
While 34 states exempt taxis and/or for-hire vehicles from their child-
restraint laws (clearly a mistake for you legislators who are reading this),
where rideshare services fit in the picture is less clear. Good ol’ Georgia wins
here again, being the only state to make a legislative distinction between
ridesharing and taxi/for-hire vehicles. While the latter are excluded from
state child-restraint laws, rideshare services are explicitly included.
Moreover, you want to ensure your child is restrained correctly. NHTSA

found that nearly 50 percent of child safety seats were misused (by placing
the child safety seat in the front passenger seat of the vehicle, failing to
secure the child safety seat on a vehicle seat, using an aftermarket belt tight-
ener, etc.) in such a way that the benefits of the seats were negated. NHTSA
has a great brochure called Keeping Kids Safe: A Parent’s Guide to Protect-
ing Children in and around Cars (https://bit.ly/2EE5w9l) to help guardians
navigate the proper way to install a child safety seat as well as to select the
appropriate seats (rear-facing, forward-facing, booster) to use at each stage
of a child’s development. If you need help ensuring your child’s safety seat is
installed correctly, please check with your local fire or police station; police
officers or firefighters should be able to show you for free how to properly
install the seat.
In essence, if you are a driver, husband, wife, parent, or child, make sure
everyone wears seat belts for even the shortest trip. You will likely get into
a couple of crashes in your lifetime, and seat belts really, really, really could
save your life. Seat belts also keep you from getting into an unintentional

wrestling match with everyone else in your car during a crash. While his
weight may not seem important while taking a leisurely stroll or going to the
movies, having your 200-pound husband flying at you out of control in a car
during a crash can cause serious injury. So, either make him wear his seat
belt or put him on a serious diet.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 50 percent of

child safety seats are misused. Make sure your child is safely and correctly restrained in
your vehicle.
Speaking of unbelted mammals of large size traveling in a car …

Remember Your Pets—They Are Passengers Like You
I was riding along with my friend Mark one day on our way to a ski trip in
Colorado. The road was icy, and my brakes were not working so well (pretty
spongy) in my old ’66 Baja Bug. However, being undaunted and 20 years
old, we pressed ahead through the snow in search of slopes. Our skis were
bungee-corded relatively securely to a roof rack on top. My malamute, Wolf,
was riding along in the back seat. Wolf was a big dog.
As we were traveling along, the car in front of us stopped suddenly and we

slammed into it. Even with no shoulder belt (that particular car model only
had lap belts), I would have been able to keep my face from hitting the steer-
ing wheel except for—you guessed it—Wolf slamming into the back of my
seat. The driver seat had no seatback lock lever or headrest, which meant I
slammed my face into the steering wheel anyway. If that wasn’t bad enough,
Wolf came over the top of the seat and landed on top of me, creating (luck-
ily) only a few bruises and cuts. He also popped out the front windshield,
which made for a very cold ride home. To add insult to (literally) injury, Wolf,
although relatively unscathed, was very scared and proceeded to pee all over
me while he struggled to find his footing. Since the Baja had a fiberglass front
and was lightweight, the impact itself caused little damage to the car in front
of us. However, our roof rack broke loose and slid up and over the car in
front, peeling paint off that car from the trunk to the hood.
Tom and Wolf as a puppy; from the author’s personal photo collection

The moral of the story is to think of your pets, and anything else heavy in
your car, as potential projectiles heading straight for you—or rolling around
with you—in a crash. There are a variety of products available to belt your
dog in the back seat, or there are dividers that separate you from your pet.
It’s better for them and it’s better for you to use such products.
And keep your gold bars or dumbbells (or sledgehammers, chainsaws, and
toolboxes) in the trunk!
Speed(ing) Kills
Anyone who has studied driving safety for a long time will tell you the factors
that most often contribute to fatal crashes: booze, speed, and unused seat
belts. (More recently, driver distraction has been added to the list.) Here are
some facts to consider regarding speed. In general, speeding more than 10
mph over the speed limit or driving too fast for conditions increases your
odds of being in a crash by about 12 times (odds = 12.0).
According to NHTSA, in 2016 nearly 20 percent of drivers involved in fatal

crashes were speeding, and the total number of fatalities involving speeding
increased by nearly 5 percent over the previous year. It’s really easy to speed
in a modern car. Even economy vehicles can go very fast, much faster than
is safe or legal. I will talk at some length about alcohol and other types of
impairment later in this book, but it should be emphasized up front that alco-
hol impacts both your driving performance and your driving behavior. Alco-
hol can also impact a driver’s judgment, leading to traveling at high speeds
and not wearing seat belts.
Consider this: if you are drunk at the legal blood alcohol content limit (BAC =
0.08 percent), you are 2.5 times more likely (odds = 2.5) to die while speeding
than if you are sober.Speeding increases your crash risk for a number of rea-
sons. These include a greater chance of losing control of the vehicle, creat-
ing greater speed differences between you and cars traveling the speed limit,
and having less time to react to a hazard. Speed also increases the probabil-
ity that you will be injured or killed in a crash. This is really just a matter of F
= MA. In this case, forces increase significantly with speed (that is, accelera-
tion). At some point, the forces can overwhelm even the most crashworthy of
cars. Crash types also change with speeding, including an increase in road-

departure crashes that lead to rollovers and collisions with fixed objects,
such as oak trees.
As with almost all risk-related contributing factors, males are more likely
than females to be involved in a fatal speeding-related crash. (In chapter 5, I
talk more about testosterone as it relates to driving.) Younger drivers speed
more than older drivers, with the speeding-related fatal crash rate almost
twice as high for drivers under the age of 34.
Extreme speeding is certainly one of the most dangerous behaviors a driver

can undertake. The risk here increases exponentially because of all the fac-
tors described above plus the increased potential to experience a severe
impact with either a moving or fixed object. Take the following scenario, for
example: if you are speeding more than 30 mph over the speed limit, your
odds of being injured in a crash are between 30 and 50 times higher (odds =
30.0–50.0) than if you are traveling within 10 mph of the speed limit.
Pay attention to the speed of those around you. Rather than be the fastest driver, learn
to go with the flow.
In terms of speed selection, you want to be traveling close to the speed limit
or the speed of traffic around you. If you are slightly over the speed limit,
chances are you will be in sync with traffic for the most part and will have

to pass and get passed the least, meaning you can avoid more possible con-
flicts.
One thing I learned a long time ago is that there are many instances when
you don’t want to be number one. This is true at a party, where it’s better to
be the guy or gal who has had the second or third most to drink rather than
the person who has had the most to drink. These “number ones” are often
the talk of the party, though not necessarily in a good way, and they are often
in trouble with their significant others. The same analogy applies to speed
selection. Pay enough attention to make sure you are not the fastest driver
around. If you are the fastest, you are not only at the highest risk of a serious
crash, you are also likely to get a ticket sooner or later.
The moral of the story is to go with the flow!
Don’t Drive Too Fast—or Too Slow

Your primary goal as a driver is to avoid conflicts with other vehicles. If you
don’t have any conflicts—meaning, you don’t occupy the same space at the
same time as other vehicles—you will never hit anyone else. The probability
of a conflict increases under a variety of circumstances, including at inter-
sections, where your path literally crosses the paths of other drivers; while
changing lanes; and when there is a speed differential. As mentioned previ-
ously, both your crash risk and the resulting severity of the crash increase
substantially when you speed. However, there is also greater risk of a crash
if you travel at a significantly slower speed than other drivers. During both
instances, you are creating what we call the speed differential, which results
in a greater chance of a severe crash.
Think of your crash risk due to speed differentials as a U-shaped curve.

The peaks of that curve—or your significant increased risk of an injury or
fatality—represent the speed differential created by either driving much too
fast or much too slow. Essentially, you do not want to deviate more than 10
mph from the speed at which the rest of traffic is traveling, or your risk will
increase … a lot.
This brings up an important point: If you can’t maintain a reasonable speed

for any reason—say, you lost the number three cylinder in your VW bus or
you ran out of gas—get the car off of the road. If you can’t get the car off

the road, get out of the car, get safely onto the shoulder, run in the direction
from which you were traveling in your vehicle (while well on the shoulder!),
and wave your arms to warn other drivers. Really. You will look much less
foolish than you would if someone hits your car at a speed differential of 60
mph.
A few winters ago, I was traveling with my friend and colleague Andy
Petersen (whom I mention in the preface) when we came upon a curved
bridge where we saw a car lying on its side in the right lane. A woman was
in this car, sticking her head up through the driver’s side window, waving
for help. Turns out that the bridge had iced over before the rest of the road,
and she spun out and somehow hit the guardrail and rolled over. I wondered
what I should do. It was a terrible situation because traffic was still moving
fast, sight distance was limited due to the curve, and the bridge was slick.
The chances were very high that someone could hit her at a high speed, and
she was certainly in no position to be protected from such a crash. So, hav-
ing limited options in a generally unsafe situation, I slowed down, stopped,
and then backed my truck down the shoulder to a straight stretch with good
sight distance and traction. I parked so that my truck straddled the right lane
and the shoulder. Again, this wasn’t the safest option, but I thought it would
work to get other drivers to both slow down and change lanes. I turned on
my hazards and put out a triangle reflector. Then, I got out of the truck and
went to help Andy get the woman out of her car and safely off the roadway.
Luckily, and despite the fact that I had created a hazard myself, cars slowed,
and traffic eventually backed up before encountering the crashed vehicle.
There is no way I would have stayed in my truck and done nothing, because
getting that woman out of the car was of paramount importance due to the
speed differential she was facing and the fact that the crash site could have
caused an unexpected event for other drivers. I also would have been at risk
by staying in my stopped truck.
Eliminate Blind Spots

Many cars these days are designed to eliminate virtually all blind spots—but
only if you adjust your mirrors appropriately. There are several important
points to consider when adjusting your mirrors:

Use all features of your mirrors to avoid blind spots. This 2016 Ford Focus has a Blind
Spot Indicator.
1. You don’t need to see the side of your car. Many people adjust their side
view mirrors so that much of their car is in view. What you want to do
instead is adjust your mirrors out to the point where you can just barely
see the side of your car.
2. Use all features of your mirrors. In my family two of our cars have the
small round convex mirrors attached to the main mirror to help elimi-
nate blind spots. These supplementary mirrors help, but it takes a little
effort and practice to make sure you are using them and not just look-
ing at the main mirror. There are other types of mirrors, including some
European models that feature a regular mirror toward the inside and a
convex mirror toward the outside. The same rules apply, though: focus
on using what is there. (If you have a backup camera as part of a warn-
ing system in your car, I talk more about this in chapter 11.)
3. Checking your blind spot is still a good idea. I have convinced myself
that my car has no blind spot, but I check it anyway. Why, you ask?
Because I don’t completely trust that there isn’t a blind spot for every
kind of motorcycle, scooter, or small car on the road. And, hey, there is
nothing wrong with double-checking!
4. Make sure the mirrors aren’t creating blind spots! I have seen cases in
which the mirrors themselves create blind spots to the left and right.
This is particularly true of, say, a large truck or van with very tall mir-
rors. Sometimes, the combination of the mirror and the vehicle pillar

can hide bicycles, pedestrians, and even scooters or motorcycles. If you
drive such a vehicle, it may be important to lean forward at intersec-
tions or to check three times to make sure nothing is hiding.
Be Prepared for the Snowpocalypse or Any Other Great Cat-

astrophe … It Could Happen to You!
I used to live in the mountains of Colorado with my first wife, Joellen. I was
commuting up and down Highway 285, which was often a fascinating drive
that fluctuated between 5,280 and 9,000 feet in elevation. One Friday night,
Joellen and I went with some friends to a laser light show in Denver (Google
it, kids). We were heading up a massive hill on Highway 285 in a rainstorm
in my ’71 VW bus. As often happened as we increased in elevation, the rain
turned to freezing rain, and the highway became a sheet of ice. However,
being a daily commuter up this road and being well-seasoned following the
rollover in my ’73 VW bus, I was prepared for these conditions.
We had chains, sleeping bags, a catalytic heater stashed in a storage area

under a seat (because we had learned to securely stow all heavy, loose
objects), pack boots, down coats, etc. As we continued our trek up the hill,
we could tell that there were many nonexperienced commuters heading into
the mountains for the weekend. Consequently, we soon found ourselves in a
surreal landscape. Vehicles were stuck everywhere in both lanes and on both
shoulders. No one was going anywhere soon because there was no way for
plows or salt trucks to get through the scene. So, with nothing better to do,
we got out of the bus and walked around on foot to survey the damage and
assist as needed.
Soon I encountered an ill-prepared, frantic woman in a mink stole and high

heels who asked for my help. I know she was frantic because she said, “Help
me, I’m frantic!” I explained to her that she may as well relax for a while; she
had plenty of gas to run the heat in her Thunderbird and a new enough car
that she wouldn’t experience fume problems.
A few cars ahead, I helped a local sheriff put on his chains because he had no
gloves. As I continued to walk, I heard a car ahead really gunning the engine.
As I got closer, I could tell that the driver, a man, had put chains on his tires
and had apparently forged a path forward. He was trying to get out, and with

Road conditions in the Colorado mountains can vary dramatically in the winter due to
extreme elevation changes. I took this photo when I lived in Colorado.
great enthusiasm, but because the road was so icy, he was just spinning in
place. And then, at some point during this spectacle, part of one of the chains
came loose and ruptured the gas tank. Sparks from the spinning chains
ignited the gas, the tank, and soon, the whole car. Fortunately, the driver and
his passenger escaped, but the car was engulfed in flames 15 or 20 feet high.
There was nothing anyone could do other than watch in amazement. Joellen
and I sat there on the Jersey barrier and watched for about an hour until the
car had basically burned itself out. At that point, the local fire department
managed to close the downhill side of the highway and get a pumper truck
down the icy hill to deal with the fire. The fire department then proceeded
to pump hundreds of gallons of water on the fire to make sure it was com-
pletely out. Of course, the water they pumped out only turned to more ice.
Nearly six hours later the road was opened again, and we made it the rest of
the way home.
The point here is to carry what you might need (properly stowed and
secured in the vehicle to avoid a projectile situation!) should the unexpected
happen: chains (in areas prone to inclement winter weather), flares, flash-
lights, reflective triangles, etc. Have a good spare tire and basic tools because
even these days you may have limited cell coverage during a trip. You can

buy cool little kits at any auto parts store at a minimal cost. I have friends
who also stash some cash—a few hundred dollars will usually do—in their cars
when taking a trip, just in case. It’s much better to have it and not need it
than to need it and not have it!
Another “expect the unexpected” story comes by way of my friend and col-
league Zac Doerzaph. During one relatively Indian summer–like day in late
November, Zac flew to Detroit from our home in southwest Virginia on a
business trip. He had a light jacket and a normal suitcase full of business
casual clothes appropriate for the weather. A few days later, Zac headed
back home, making the return trip in a car since he was taking a last-minute
opportunity to shuttle back one of our test vehicles.
Well, Zac ran into an unexpected blizzard that dumped about 18 inches of
snow within a few hours, crippling the West Virginia turnpike on which he
was traveling. The vehicle he was driving was not made for heavy snow,
and he lacked any emergency supplies. The car wasn’t his, and he had not
expected to drive back home, much less spend the next 12 hours with
numerous stranded motorists while authorities—including the National
Guard—worked diligently to open the roadway one vehicle at a time. He
had nothing with him, except slacks and polo shirts. He had no cell phone
charger, very bad reception, and limited food since he gave most of what he
had to a nearby mother for her toddler, and he was nearly out of gas. To deal
with plummeting temperatures and to do his best to stay warm throughout
the night, Zac put on both pairs of pants he had, made a turban out of his
polo shirts, and curled into a ball on the floorboards and away from the cold
glass of the vehicle. He got invited into the cab of a semi to warm up, but
declined the kind offer … at least, he figured, until he was desperate. Zac
spent a very uncomfortable eight-hour night trying to stay warm and care-
fully conserve what little gas remained in the tank in the hopes that a plow
might clear the way.
The point is simple. Be prepared.

3. Defensive Driving 101
Don’t Hit Anything
The goal of defensive driving is to get you to your destination safely, having
successfully anticipated hazards and avoided conflicts with other vehicles or
objects on the road. When it comes to driving, the best defense is not a good
offense, even though there may be times when most of us would wish for
offensive weapons in our cars. Nothing fancy, just a few James Bond/Aston
Martin kinds of machine guns and smoke bombs. The funny thing is if you
mention that to the hardware guys at VTTI, they actually start trying to fig-
ure out how to do it … anyway, I digress. The point is don’t confuse defensive
driving with driving aggressively. NHTSA defines the occurrence of aggres-
sive driving as “the operation of a motor vehicle in a manner that endangers
or is likely to endanger persons or property.” Basically, driving aggressively
means you’re driving like a bat out of hell with no regard for the well-being
of others. (I’ll talk more about aggressive driving in chapter 7.)
Below are some tips to move you safely from point A to point B as a defensive
driver while ensuring you do not compromise the safety of your fellow trans-
portation users. Along the way, I’ll give you points on how to avoid being the
aggressor.
It’s All About Time and Space

As you drive your shiny metal box of unusual size and weight, it is important
to stay away from all the other shiny boxes of unusual sizes and weights. The
best way to do this is to increase the space—and the time—between you and
everything else that you might possibly come into contact with. I emphasize
time because it is sometimes more important than space. For example, if you
were 60 feet away from a car in a parking lot while traveling 10 mph, it would
take more than four seconds until you hit the car. That’s relatively an eter-
nity in terms of having enough time to avoid a crash. By contrast, you would
only have a little more than half a second to avoid a crash under the same
distance while traveling 70 mph on an interstate.

Of course, an easy way to increase time and space is to not tailgate. Following
too closely obviously decreases your space and time. If we return to making
our figurative cake, there are many, many crash cases each year that begin
with this ingredient (following too closely) present. In the grand scheme of
things, not tailgating means you will get to where you’re going two seconds
later. Other ways to create more space include moving to the left lane to pass
a disabled vehicle on the shoulder of a highway and giving bicycles, pedes-
trians, and parked cars a wide berth as you pass. These practices probably
seem obvious, but if you think about them in terms of giving yourself more
space and time to react if something unexpected occurs, they become good
defensive driving habits.
A Most Important Defense: Stay Away from Heavy Vehicles

Here is another friendly physics lesson: a long-haul truck is 40 tons of unfor-
giving steel running the length of a football field every three seconds. In
other words—as you will read time and again throughout this book—stay
away from trucks.
Long-haul trucks are made up of about 40 tons of steel. Keeping space and time between
you and the truck will increase your odds of avoiding a crash!
Defensive Driving 101 | 25

The vast majority of truck drivers are professional, safe drivers. But just like
all other types of drivers, most does not mean all, and even good truck dri-
vers occasionally get in bad situations.
About 10 years ago there was a multi-truck collision on an interstate near my

home. The crash happened when a truck mowed into a line of stopped traffic
while traveling at about 65 mph, with no indication of the truck driver brak-
ing beforehand. The truck driver was likely drowsy or distracted, resulting in
a deadly recipe. The situation subsequently created a hazard for other dri-
vers. Crashes like this are not terribly frequent, but they are always terrible.
In this case emergency workers arrived on the scene and worked for sev-
eral hours to separate two Class 8 semitrucks. After working for about two
hours or so, they realized for the first time that there was a minivan sand-
wiched between the two trucks. The minivan was about one-third of its orig-
inal length; all four of its occupants were killed instantly in the crash. There
is no airbag, no crumple zone, and no five-star vehicle of any weight that
would have allowed that family to survive. The forces generated in such a
crash were just too great.
With this in mind, here are some facts about trucks from my friend, former
student, and colleague Rich Hanowski and his staff from the VTTI Center for
Truck and Bus Safety:
1. Approximately 10 percent of truck drivers account for 40 percent to 50

percent of crash and near-crash risks. Your only problem is that you
don’t know which ones are part of the 10 percent.
2. Two out of every five truck drivers admit to dozing or nodding off at
the wheel at least once in their career.
3. Even when truck drivers are awake and alert, they are doing some kind
of secondary task (like talking on a cell phone, reading something, etc.)
more than 25 percent of the time.
4. A texting truck driver has 23 times the risk of being involved in a safety-
critical event compared to a driver just traveling down the road. And
truckers do text!
The takeaway is simple: keeping space and time between you and heavy
trucks will really increase your odds of avoiding a crash with one of them.
And this isn’t just because truck drivers make mistakes. It is because two out

of every three crashes involving a car and a truck are the fault of the car
driver.
The large-truck fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled is 1.46,
while the fatality rate for cars is 1.12 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. So
many of us can do better around truck drivers. The following tips may be of
help when steering clear of trucks:
1. If you are following a truck, stay back until you are ready to pass.
2. If there is a vehicle ahead of you passing a truck, wait until that vehicle
completes the pass before starting your pass. Do not ride alongside the
truck.
3. When you are passing on either side of a truck, be wary of its blind
spots. Those danger zones differ from those of cars and are located
anywhere behind the truck and alongside the cab, particularly just in
front of the cab on the right. Our friends at the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration (FMCSA) have good information about the “No
Zone” of a truck. Some truck carriers also display a placard on the back
of trucks indicating blind spots. The bottom line is to stay away from
these areas while you drive!
4. Always pass trucks briskly, even if you have to speed up a little to pass
safely. When you do make your pass, do so quickly. You do not want to
linger in the blind spots of a truck for any length of time. Just keep a
copy of this book in your vehicle and show it to the cops if you get
pulled over for speeding up to pass a truck; tell them a safety profes-
sional told you to do it.
5. Trucks can’t stop as fast as you can, so don’t cut them off. Don’t pass
and then slow down; give truck drivers plenty of room on your briskly
executed lane change.
Expect the Unexpected

Periodically, I am asked to serve as an expert witness in a legal case involving
a crash. At least once per year, I get a call from an attorney representing a
client—on either side of the case—involved in a crash in which a car or truck
slammed into a line of vehicles with no signs of braking or slowing. Usually,
the defendant was driving on the interstate and hit a plaintiff in a stalled
car, truck, hay wagon, etc. More often than not, the crash occurred during

ideal driving conditions: dry, clear, during the day, with a long sight distance.
These crashes left behind no, or very short, skid marks before the vehicles
hit.
You may ask, How could this be? How can you miss a stopped vehicle in
broad daylight? That’s typically what the courts ask as well. The driver must
have been looking down at something or must have been falling asleep at
the wheel, right? The answer is yes. Most of the time the driver was look-
ing somewhere else, even if it was just a random glance away from the road-
way. However, regardless of whether the offending driver was distracted
or fatigued, in the majority of these scenarios the stopped vehicle violated
the expectations of the driver. Essentially, the stopped vehicle created a key
ingredient to make our figurative cake, resulting in a crash. No one expects a
vehicle to be stopped in the left lane of an interstate, at least not on a rural
interstate. It is a very rare event. And humans are notoriously bad at being
alert and ready to respond to a rare event (a fact I will discuss at length later
in this book). Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here, several
of my colleagues were recently discussing some research being done with
truck-mounted attenuators (TMAs), like the one pictured here.
Despite being brightly colored, work vehicles like this truck-mounted attenuator can
surprise drivers if they are not alert and prepared to respond to the unexpected.

Pretty conspicuous, right? Lots of bright, flashing yellow lights … who could
possibly hit that? Well, in northern Virginia alone more than 70 TMAs were
hit in 2017. Why? Because they are a great example of violating driver expec-
tations: they are generally slow-moving or stopped altogether in work zones,
where traffic would otherwise be flowing normally.
Work zones can create slowdowns and unexpected braking. Pay extra attention!
I have two pieces of advice here:
1. Work on anticipating road hazards. The hazard could be a service van

blocking the sight distance to an intersection, or it could be a “Work
Zone Ahead” or “Mowing” sign on the interstate that may create unsta-
ble traffic and a sudden slowdown. The blue lights of a police car
almost always make someone hit the brakes to avoid a ticket, even if
traffic is flowing only slightly above the speed limit. The hazard could
be an oncoming car that is fully or partially blocked from your vision by
cars in the turn lane opposite to you. You may encounter a crowded
street full of pedestrians in a college town after a football game. There
are just too many cases to name. The point is to work on being alert
and wary when the situation demands it. Don’t make assumptions
about what you can’t see and what other road users might do.
2. Keep your eyes on the road. Stay engaged in the driving task so that you

can brake hard and fast at any moment if needed. This is a hard piece of
advice to follow, and I will talk about this point throughout the book. In
general, though, keep your eyes on the forward roadway. Be aware that
you have a primary task (driving) to which you must pay attention by
scanning the environment, controlling your vehicle, and being ready to
avoid hazards.
Don’t Violate the Expectations of Other Drivers

The flip side to expecting the unexpected is to avoid being the cause of
the unexpected. You will read this several times throughout this book, but
you don’t want other drivers to hit you because you violated their expecta-
tions—that is, you do not want to be the key ingredient that results in the fig-
urative cake being made. To avoid being the unexpected, go the speed other
drivers pretty much expect; get your car off the road if you have to stop; and
if you can’t get your car off the road, get out of the car, get to a safe place,
and warn other drivers. When parking on the side of the street, check your
mirrors before opening your car door. And, of course, follow the rules of the
road because that’s what people expect.
I was telling my friend and colleague John about this book. In addition to giv-
ing me a lot of good publishing advice, John shared one of his stories that
illustrates a point about violating the expectations of other drivers. When
John first began to drive, he missed an exit on the highway. Being young and
inexperienced, he decided it was a good idea to back his car up on the inter-
state and then take the exit. No other cars were around when he started
this process, but soon there was a car approaching and it hit John’s car from
behind. Fortunately, the driver was able to brake to the point where no one
was hurt and the damage was relatively minor. I say fortunately because the
truth is that road scenarios can change quickly when cars are essentially
traveling the length of a football field every three seconds.
John, of course, thought that he was in serious trouble, that he would lose
his newly received license for reckless driving. A police officer arrived on the
scene, got both licenses, and proceeded to interview the other driver. The
officer then came to John’s car and said, “Here is the police report so you can
make an insurance claim. That guy had some crazy story about you back-
ing up on the interstate, but I didn’t believe him and gave him a ticket. You

are free to go.” John learned an important lesson that day about violating the
expectations of other drivers, not to mention a lesson learned about luck!
Is There a Best Way to Crash?

One of my favorite musicians is an artist named Todd Snider. (Todd, you
may remember me; I was the guy with the gray beard singing out of key in
the front row.) Todd wrote a very touching song called “45 Miles” about the
brief moment of time between realizing you are going to wreck your car and
wrecking your car. As he explains in the preamble to the song, it only has one
chord because he was “pressed for time.” (As of the writing of this second
edition, I am proud to say that my daughter, Emily, who works in the music
industry, has obtained a copy of this book signed by Todd himself. Thank you,
Emily, and thank you, Todd.)
Many of us have experienced exactly what Todd is talking about. On rare

occasions (made rarer still if you continue reading this book), a situation is
simply not salvageable and you have no option but to hit something.
In such situations it is important, first and foremost, to understand what dri-

vers typically do in the same situations so that you can increase your chances
of reacting well in what is a very short time period. I performed a study with
my friend, colleague, and former student Jon Hankey in which we looked at
driver behavior during looming crash situations. The study was performed
with several of our colleagues from NHTSA; it was Jon’s dissertation when we
were at the University of Iowa. Jon used a high-fidelity driving simulator for
this study, creating scenarios in which drivers had to react to different cases
in which a vehicle pulled out in front of them at an intersection.
A very interesting finding from this study was that drivers, when they have
the least amount of time to react to an impending crash, react the slowest.
They are also just as likely to steer as they are to brake. Why might this be
the case? We believe it is because the drivers in our study saw no obvious
way to avoid a crash in the split second they had to decide what to do. With-
out an obvious ideal choice, they took longer to consider their options. This
is probably also why roughly half of them began to brake first, while half of
them steered first.

Another, probably less surprising, finding from the study was that drivers
steered their vehicles away from the direction in which the other vehicle was
entering the roadway. For example, if the other vehicle was coming from the
right, the drivers tended to steer left into the opposing lane of traffic. As I
will discuss later, braking like hell and avoiding head-on collisions are really
better strategies in virtually all circumstances like this.
Here’s another example to illustrate what drivers often do when they are
faced with the inevitable. I helped perform a study in the mid-1990s led by
my friend, colleague, and former student Mike Mollenhauer that looked at
driver emergency response on icy roads. This was a very cool study, literally
and figuratively. We took drivers to the spillway of a dam in Iowa in January
after having the local fire department spray the area with water. We told the
volunteer drivers that we were trying to determine how they liked a new kind
of car on slick roads (deception, which is sometimes carefully done in our
line of work, but not lying). After they drove around for a while on a course
we laid out, we then slid a large object that looked very heavy and ominous
(it wasn’t) into their path, giving them little time to react. Of course, we made
sure that the drivers were in no danger, but they didn’t really know what it
was they were going to hit and what damage might be done to the car.
The impetus for this study was the advent of anti-lock brake systems (ABS)—a
fascinating phenomenon in transportation history. After the introduction
of ABS, rear-end crashes decreased slightly, but road-departure crashes
increased slightly despite all expectations to the contrary. Before the cre-
ation of ABS, drivers would often try to steer but would still hit the car or
object in the road because the vehicle was still skidding or sliding after the
driver slammed on the brakes. Steering in a crash scenario without ABS more
or less just gave the driver a false sense of security that he or she had some
ounce of control. With ABS, however, drivers now had full steering control.
If they steered to the right, lo and behold, they often went off the road. Why
does this matter? Generally speaking, if you leave the roadway instead of hit-
ting the car or object in front of you, you are more likely to be injured or
killed because of a rollover or a collision with a fixed object, such as an oak
tree.
We discovered two important points in this study. First, drivers usually steer
to the right to avoid an object in front of them after slamming on the brakes.
This occurs when drivers realize they don’t have enough time and space to

stop. As mentioned, steering to the right with ABS usually resulted in dri-
vers going off the road. Second, most folks back then didn’t know how to
use ABS, despite the best efforts of car dealers everywhere to educate buy-
ers about the system. At the very least, the drivers in this particular study
reverted back to the automatic behavior of “pumping the brakes” on ice, a
maneuver we were all taught in the dark ages. However, the correct response
in an ABS-equipped car is to squeeze the brakes hard until they “chatter.” If
you have never experienced the chattering sound of ABS brakes, it can be a
bit disconcerting, but it is a very good sign. The chatter should reassure you
that your car is pumping the brakes for you at a much faster rate and more
effectively than you can move your foot. Essentially, a modern car and a dri-
ver who knows how the car works make a great pair when it comes to avoid-
ing crashes.
There are several other considerations that should guide our brief thoughts
when faced with an imminent crash: fixed objects, delta-V, and vulnerable
road users.
My friend Gene Farber, who passed away a number of years ago and is men-
tioned in more detail later in this book, used to tell a story about his days
working at Ford. Gene had the opportunity to actually sit in a car during a
low-speed crash test. The test was designed to run a car into a solid wall at
10 mph. Gene thought what most of us would think: “How bad could it be? It’s
only 10 mph.” It ended up being a shocking and bone-jarring experience for
Gene, and he was physically sore for several days. Now, imagine what hitting
an oak tree at 60 mph would feel like.
When it comes to hitting a solid, fixed object, a rule of thumb is that the
potential for injury is the same as hitting a moving object at twice the speed
you are traveling. Cars are considered “moving” objects even when they are
stopped because they move and deform (bend, crumple, etc.) when you hit
them. This rule breaks down to some extent for head-on collisions because
the moving object is about to exert tremendous force on you as part of the
equation. This brings us to delta-V, which is also known as change in velocity,
or the total speed between two colliding objects. If you are traveling at, say,
60 mph, a head-on collision has a delta-V of 120 mph if we assume the other
car is also traveling at 60 mph. If you hit a stationary car while traveling at 60
mph, the delta-V is just your speed.

Now let’s consider crashes involving vulnerable road users—pedestrians,
cyclists, folks on scooters or mopeds, or motorcyclists. If there is any way to
avoid hitting a vulnerable road user, you should do so. If you think back to
the F = MA equation, you are on the side with a higher mass, meaning you
are going to exert a whole lot of force with your vehicle. On top of that, these
folks have very little protection against metal traveling at high rates of speed,
so the outcome is often fatal for them.
Killing someone, regardless of the circumstances, will change your life in a

bad way on so many levels, not to mention the devastation you’ll cause for
everyone involved. Be alert, attentive, and courteous around vulnerable road
users. Even if you have to wait 20 seconds to safely pass a bicyclist, that
cyclist’s life is worth more than your time.
The reason I am telling you all this is to give you a strategy for what to hit if
you have limited choices and you know you are going to crash. I have seen
alert, attentive, and sober drivers do some amazing things to avoid crashes, a
fact I will later discuss in greater detail. However, if you are “pressed for time”
in a crash scenario and can’t really carefully consider your options, here are
a few very simple rules that may help you:
1. Don’t steer left, thereby risking a head-on collision. Due to its significant
delta-V, a head-on collision has the highest injury and fatality rates of
any crash type. The rate of fatality in a head-on collision is three times
higher than a road-departure crash and 41 times higher than a rear-
end crash. This is why you may have heard the phrase “take the ditch”
in the context of dealing with someone crossing the center line heading
toward you. Life is more complicated than that, however, and there are
always exceptions. For instance, if you are in the left lane of a divided
highway and have the choice between slamming into a line of stopped
traffic at 60 mph (maybe because you were tired or distracted or you
were just not expecting stopped traffic) or steering left into the median,
the median may be a good choice.
2. Avoid the ditch if you can at all help it. Although better than a head-on
crash, road departure crashes are also very bad. The rate of fatality or
injury in a road-departure crash is roughly 14 times higher than a
rear-end crash. Steering into a ditch may put you in the path of fixed
objects or could lead to a rollover. As described earlier, you may have a

natural tendency to steer right. If so, try to keep your vehicle on the
shoulder if there is one and you can perform such a maneuver.
Before the advent of anti-lock braking systems (ABS), drivers were taught to “pump the
brakes” on ice and snow, but the correct response in ABS-equipped cars is to squeeze the
brakes hard until they “chatter.”
3. Brake like hell! A fascinating aspect of driver behavior is that most dri-
vers brake at only about 60 percent of the vehicle’s braking ability
before a rear-end crash. Braking to a car’s limit is something we rarely
do. Most often, we are worried about upsetting passengers or spilling
coffee. Take the family out to the local shopping mall with no one
around and slam on the brakes! Have everyone try it a few times. That
way, you will be ready when you are about to crash and can hit the
brakes hard and fast with absolutely no hesitation. Believe me when I
tell you that it’s easier to apologize to your spouse after a hard brake
than after a crash, and getting coffee stains out of your carpet at an
auto detailer is cheaper than any trip to a body shop. Again, there are
some exceptions. If you brake to the limit of your car’s ability, you
should pat yourself on the back for that brief moment … until the driver

behind you hits you because he or she is only braking at 60 percent
capacity. Remember, if someone is behind you when you brake hard to
avoid a crash, you become the one violating expectations in such a sce-
nario. But hey, at least you won’t get a ticket, and your insurance rates
won’t go up. Two words of advice here: keep an extra copy of this book
in your car to give to the person who just hit you so they will know to
brake harder, and be alert and attentive so you can generally avoid hav-
ing to brake hard and get hit from behind.
4. Buy a car that brakes like hell! VTTI completed an analysis of key crash
risk factors using the Second Strategic Highway Research Program
Naturalistic Driving Study. This is the largest naturalistic study of its
kind to date, involving more than 3,500 drivers from six data collection
sites across the US, with nearly 2,000 crashes identified from among
those drivers. In our analysis, we looked at 905 of the crashes that were
higher in severity, meaning they involved injuries and/or property
damage, and found that nearly 70 percent of crashes involved the driver
engaging in some type of observable distraction. Those of us at VTTI
have believed that for some time this key “cake” ingredient has been
present in large quantities of crashes based on our study trends. How-
ever, this analysis marks the first time such data have been substanti-
ated using the largest crash-only data set available for light vehicles.
Meanwhile, NHTSA is adding to its star-rating system automatic emer-
gency braking (AEB), such as crash-imminent braking (meaning, the car
brakes automatically if it believes you are about to crash) and dynamic
brake support (that is, the car senses that you hit the brakes hard and
automatically takes you from the 60 percent capacity level to the maxi-
mum braking level the car can perform). These systems may help
greatly with the US crash problem, but only time will tell. NHTSA does
not require AEB on all new cars, though it can choose to mandate such.
However, even without a NHTSA requirement, four auto manufacturers
voluntarily made it standard in more than one-half of their 2017 vehi-
cles, and another five made it standard in about 30 percent of their 2017
vehicles; 20 have volunteered to equip their new passenger vehicles
with AEB by 2022.

Hit Bambi, Thumper, and Rocky If You Have to … But
Maybe not Bullwinkle
Pop quiz: What is the most dangerous animal in the United States?
1. Venomous snakes
2. Sharks
3. Black widow and brown recluse spiders
4. Deer
The answer is deer, by a large margin. State Farm estimates that each year
more than 1.3 million crashes in the US are caused by the presence of deer.
By contrast, about six people die in the US from wild venomous snake bites
per year (which does not include another six or so who die from “snake han-
dling” or religious ceremonies); about seven die from spider bites. On aver-
age, shark attacks cause one fatality every two years in the United States.
More than 1.3 million crashes in the US involve deer.
Senator John Warner of Virginia (now retired) helped VTTI become the
National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, which was a
congressional designation. When the building that housed the center was

dedicated, Senator Warner was in attendance. During the dedication lun-
cheon, he told me that he often sees deer while driving around Virginia and
asked whether he should just hit the deer or veer into the ditch when faced
with a crash situation.
Being the researcher that I am and full of facts, I explained that the odds
were dependent on the type of vehicle he was driving. Semitruck drivers
should always hit the deer, I explained, as well as SUV drivers. However, if
you are driving a two-seater convertible, it depends.
The senator, slightly less patiently, asked simply, “Do I hit the deer or not?”
Again, I began to explain the factors at play in such a situation, to which he
replied, “You aren’t answering my question.” As I began again, Gary Allen, a
friend and colleague from the Virginia Department of Transportation, said,
“Hit the deer, Senator.” That response satisfied the senator greatly, and he
then went on to tell a fascinating story about when he was married to Eliza-
beth Taylor (a story for a different book, I suppose).
There I am with Senator John Warner (left).
The point here is very similar to the point made earlier about how to crash
when it is inevitable. While some deaths occur from a large animal coming
through the windshield, most deaths occur when drivers depart the road to
avoid hitting the animal.
That is, the odds are in your favor if you stay on the road, in your lane, and

hit the animal rather than veering off the road to avoid it. This is certainly
true of opossums, skunks, squirrels, and even dogs and cats, although some-
what less so with moose. Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t brake like hell
as I described previously. However, even when braking rapidly and as hard as
you can, you should be at least a little wary of a secondary crash occurring
if you are in traffic. Overall, though, stay in your lane unless you see a much
better option like safely steering to a shoulder.
Stay Alert and Be Wary!

As described in the preface to this book, VTTI has conducted many natural-
istic driving studies that require putting tiny cameras, radar, and other sen-
sors in people’s own cars while they go about their everyday lives. We have
data from enough cars, trucks, and motorcycles (about 4,000) over enough
time (studies have lasted up to three years) to capture a lot of crashes (nearly
2,000 and counting).
Having watched many crashes in the resulting naturalistic driving videos,

one thing I can tell you is that the most common crash occurrence has at
least two key ingredients present to make our figurative cake: (1) the driver
is not looking at the road, and (2) something unexpected happens in front of
the driver’s car. There are often other elements at play, but these two fac-
tors combined are very common in a crash. I will talk at some length about
the risks of taking your eyes off of the road, but I wanted to bring it up here
in the context of defensive driving. So, here are a few tips to help you avoid
crashes:
1. You need to be able to see far enough ahead. This is the concept of sight
distance—that is, the distance in terms of both space and time that you
can see when you look. And sight distance changes all the time due to
traffic, weather, curves and hills, vegetation, etc. Get used to paying
attention to not only how far you can see but how fast things might
change. I’ll give you an example of an intersection near where I used to
live. When I stopped at the stop sign, I needed to make a left-hand turn,
but the sight distance to the right was very short, the speeds were rela-
tively high (about 45 mph), and there were often trucks headed to the
local rock quarry. I literally had to make sure there was no traffic to the
left and stare to the right as I pulled out, prepared to hit the gas if

needed. If I did a normal right-left, right-left look as they teach you in
driver’s ed class, I would have been mowed over a time or two by a
10-wheeled dump truck.
2. Look far down the road and plan ahead. Relative to sight distance, use
whatever you have. If you can see far ahead, look far ahead. As with
most everything in life, there is an exception to this rule: you need to be
wary of closer objects like parked cars, pedestrians, and so on, particu-
larly if you are traveling in an urban area. However, you still want to
shift your gaze to look ahead in this environment to the extent feasible.
Look ahead and through the windows and windshields of other vehicles
for brake lights. This strategy allows you to make maneuvers such as
braking or changing lanes without any sudden moves, thus helping you
avoid conflicts with other vehicles. It also helps you avoid getting
trapped behind cars on the highway.
3. Look and see. If you look at crash databases, there is a factor in some
crashes called “looked but failed to see.” This factor is thought to be a
key “cake” ingredient in roughly 10 percent of crashes. In these cases,
the driver typically states that he or she looked in the direction neces-
sary but didn’t see the other vehicle or whatever else was coming. This
may be because the driver went through the motions to look but wasn’t
really processing the information because he or she was thinking about
something else, the driver’s view was at least partially blocked by the
structure of the car (maybe a blind spot), the object the driver hit wasn’t
very conspicuous (perhaps a bicycle rider in gray clothing traveling
against a grayish background), and/or the driver was looking for some-
thing specific. You would be surprised at the number of cases in which
a crash occurs because a driver was looking for a car and instead over-
looked a truck, pulling out in front of the truck and hitting it. In any
event, it is important to focus on looking hard and looking long enough
to see anything that may be “hiding.”
4. Look out for the looming threshold. Brake lights ahead convey the simple
message that the driver has his or her foot on the brake. Most of the
time, the driver is just resting his or her foot on the brake and is getting
ready to slow or is slowing gently. However, once in a while, the driver
ahead is slamming on the brakes. Unfortunately, the brake lights look
the same regardless of the level of braking. If you are pretty close to the
car, you may get other cues that the driver has slammed on the brakes.
Notably, as you rapidly approach the stopping car, the visual angle (or

the size of the car in your visual field) gets larger pretty quickly. This is
called looming. At some distance away, you don’t notice this looming
because you are outside of what is called the looming threshold, where
the size of the car in your visual field does not change very fast. In such
cases of being outside the looming threshold, you really can’t tell the
difference between a gentle brake and a hard brake maneuver. I have
seen a number of crash cases during which Driver One looked away for
a second or two when brake lights came on ahead, having assumed that
Driver Two was applying a gentle brake. However, in these cases, Driver
Two had slammed on his or her brakes; by the time Driver One looked
back at the road, there was no time to stop. Remember that if brake
lights come on, keep looking until you know what the situation is and
can react accordingly.
Brake lights on the cars ahead let you know that drivers are braking. However, if you are
outside the “looming threshold,” you may not be able to react quickly enough to avoid a
crash.
Watch Out for Impaired Drivers!

I am using impaired in the broadest sense for this discussion, including being
drowsy, distracted, drunk, and/or drugged. Not too many years ago, when
you saw a car weaving out of the lane, chances were pretty good that you

were witnessing a drunk driver. Now, you might be witnessing a driver tex-
ting, a driver checking stock on his or her smartphone, or a driver falling
asleep at the wheel. The symptoms are mostly the same, but they should tell
you the following: be aware of who is doing what, be wary, and stay away!
The most obvious indicator of an impaired driver is an inability to keep his
or her vehicle in the travel lane. Beyond that, you should look for signs of
the degree of impairment. If the offending driver is weaving a little out of the
lane to the right onto an open shoulder, it could just be a momentary dis-
traction and the driver is otherwise sober. If the offending driver is weaving
in both directions and appears to be overcorrecting, or if the driver is weav-
ing more than a couple of feet out of the lane, or if you see such behavior
exhibited two or more times during the span of just a few minutes, then you
are driving near a hazard. You need to go out of your way to avoid this haz-
ard.
Other less obvious impaired behaviors include an inability to maintain speed.

Drivers who continually speed up and slow down are typically impaired in
some form. Also, watch out for inappropriate speeds that include drivers
traveling too fast or too slow beyond what is reasonable.
Avoiding impaired drivers is a tip that can save your life. If you don’t believe
me, I will give you a statistic that should scare the hell out of you: more than
13 percent of drivers involved in fatal crashes have invalid licenses or no
license at all. In the good ol’ US of A it’s not easy to get your license revoked.
Far and away, the easiest and most common way to lose your license is to
get a DUI. However, engaging in other reckless behaviors, such as getting a
second or third reckless driving conviction, will get you there as well. In any
event, you should always watch other drivers and be wary.

4. Adapt, Overcome, and Survive
As drivers we frequently adapt to the conditions around us. Sometimes
we do so consciously, sometimes unconsciously. For example, most of us
instinctively know that driving in city traffic is different than driving on an
interstate or on rural roadways. The conditions are different, and we under-
stand that we need to adapt accordingly.
The unfortunate part is that while we as drivers are accustomed to adapting,

we are not always good at judging risk. Take, for instance, driving in bad
weather. Those of us accustomed to driving in snow and ice know that we
need to slow down during a winter storm to avoid losing control of our cars.
Drivers in the South, however, don’t always understand this in the same way
because they don’t have as much experience driving in icy conditions. They
are unfamiliar with the risk and therefore can’t judge it accurately. This is
what happened in Atlanta in January 2014, when enough drivers failed to
adapt to icy conditions and crashed, closing major roadways for several days.
What makes all of this especially dangerous is the simple fact that no matter
how good you may be at adapting to your driving conditions, you are sharing
the road with other drivers whom you have no control over. Chances are that
some of these drivers will not be as good as you are at adapting and some
will not be as good at judging their risks. Consider this statistic: VTTI stud-
ies have shown that roughly 10 percent of drivers create between 40 and 50
percent of the overall crash risk.
A big part of this statistic is that the drivers who make up this 10 percent
don’t know how, or choose not, to adapt. It’s a mind-boggling fact, but it’s
true. Therefore, it’s important that you and your family, kids, friends, and
dogs not only avoid being among the 10 percent but also know how to watch
out for those 10 percent!
VTTI conducts naturalistic driving studies that provide plenty of examples

to illustrate this point. We see drivers who never have a near crash, a term
I’ll use throughout this book that essentially means having a close call. By
contrast, we see drivers who experience dozens of near crashes and a few
crashes or minor collisions. Not surprisingly, these latter drivers are usually
| 43
distracted, at times by some pretty remarkable acts, such as removing a
tongue stud while simultaneously talking on a handheld phone and driving
70 mph (for those of you who may not know, it takes both hands to remove a
tongue stud). Or driving while eating … with chopsticks. Or having a passen-
ger hold the wheel while lighting a two-foot bong. These drivers are part of
the 10 percent, and it’s obvious that they have issues gauging perceived and
actual risks.
But lest ye have never been sitting in a ditch next to an icy road, or climbed
sheepishly out of a car explaining why you didn’t stop in time, or had to make
up a story about the inadequacies of speed limit signs, do not cast the first
stone upon your brethren. Because as you will learn, driving safety is no sim-
ple matter and we are all at risk. I have studied the subject for more than 35
years and still have much to learn, as do my numerous bright colleagues.
In truth, we all adapt when we drive. Adaptation can be both good (if you
adapt to maintain a low level of risk) and bad (if you don’t adapt enough or if
you don’t perceive the change in risk).
In the remainder of this chapter I will offer suggestions for minimizing your
risk by adapting to the different conditions and scenarios you are likely to
encounter.
Adaptation 101: Road and Traffic Conditions

As I’ve noted before, crashes are most likely to occur when an unexpected
event happens while the driver is looking away from the road due to distrac-
tion, fatigue, or a desire to just look around. Often, the unexpected event is
related in some way to the road the car is traveling on or the traffic condi-
tions at that moment. Learning to adapt appropriately is key to minimizing
your risk, probably as much as any other aspect of safe driving.
The Road You Are Driving on Matters

Roads are much safer than they were just 15 or 20 years ago, and they are
getting better all the time. Better sight distances, wide shoulders, inter-
changes instead of intersections, lighting in key locations, better markings,
and “roadside hardware,” including different types of barriers and guardrails,

have all made a real difference to road safety. Nevertheless, your level of risk
varies dramatically depending on the type of road on which you are travel-
ing. For example, you are 2.4 times more likely (odds = 2.4) to get in a crash
on a two-lane road than on a divided highway.
Your risk varies by road type, so adapt accordingly
As drivers, we have the ability to reduce our risk simply by choosing inter-
states and divided highways over, say, back roads. Of course, we don’t always
have a choice when mapping out our routes, which is why I have chosen not
to talk extensively about this point. What is more instructive—because we
have more control over it—is our ability to adapt successfully to whatever
kind of road you travel.
I met my wife Melissa in graduate school. We were working in the same

lab, doing driving safety research with our adviser, Walt Wierwille, who was
a pioneer in studying safety factors such as steering control, drowsiness,
and visual attention. For Melissa’s master’s thesis she examined the attention
required to drive on different kinds of roads, including rural curvy two-
lane, straight two-lane, four-lane, and divided highways. She and I measured
parameters like sight distance, road width, shoulder width, obstacle pres-
ence, posted speeds, etc. She found that different road types require dif-
ferent levels of attention from drivers. For example, interstates require less
attention than rural roads. This was not surprising; the surprising part was
the degree to which different roads require different levels of attention. You
have to keep your eyes on a curvy roadway just to keep your car on the road.
By contrast, if you’re traveling on an interstate, you can take your eyes off the
road for a relatively longer amount of time (which still needs to be less than
two seconds—more on that later) and still keep your vehicle in your travel
lane. Of course, taking your eyes off the interstate won’t help you avoid hit-
Adapt, Overcome, and Survive | 45

ting something in your lane. The point here is that you always need to pay
attention to the type of road you are on—and then be sure to adapt accord-
ingly.
Traffic Stability
Another important safety factor that requires drivers to adapt is traffic sta-
bility. The fact is you are one-half as likely (odds = 0.5) to get in a crash when
traffic is light and free-flowing compared to when roads are congested and
traffic is unstable.
The key word here is unstable. On the one hand, traffic can be congested
to the point that all cars are moving slowly, in which case you are less likely
to get injured because you (and everyone else on the road) are traveling at
a lower speed. On the other hand, traffic can be congested, but not to the
extent that vehicles have to slow down or stop. It’s when vehicles are moving
unpredictably—slowing down and speeding up—that the risk of crash rises.
Crashes are most likely to occur when an unexpected event happens while the driver is
looking away from the road for any reason, including visual or manual distraction.

Unpredictability makes it harder for you to adapt because the conditions are
unstable. In such cases, the best way to adapt overall is to stay focused and
always keep your eyes on the road.This means resisting the temptation to eat
that hamburger or to stare at those ponies in the nearby field until the road
demand is low. Also, you can usually slow down, which is a good strategy as
long as you’re not going too slow or unexpectedly slow to the point that you
impede the flow of traffic. To keep yourself safe while driving, you need to
be wary and adapt more than you may think necessary.
When they were in high school, my son, Chris, and his friend Nick were tak-
ing a three-hour trip back home from a concert. They ran into heavy traffic
on the highway, which slowed them down considerably. My son was taking
a nap in the passenger seat while Nick was driving a shift. Being the consci-
entious friend that Nick was, he was listening to music on his iPod through
his earbuds so that Chris could sleep. While understandable, this move also
increased the risk of a typical crash ingredient: distraction.
Nick looked down momentarily at his iPod right as traffic stopped, causing
Nick to hit the car in front. The unexpected had become more likely, and
the key ingredients combined to make our figurative cake. No one was hurt,
but the car sustained some damage. At that point, my concern turned to the
fact that they were traveling in Chris’s car. So, there was an insurance claim,
which Nick paid for in full. No harm, no foul, except that Nick remained on
my policy for a couple of years afterward, despite our efforts to explain to
the insurance company that he was not a family member or primary driver
of the car.
Bad Weather
According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), nearly one-quar-
ter of crashes are related to weather. Driving in bad weather (rain, snow, fog,
sleet, freezing rain) increases your risk of a crash due to reduced visibility
and/or reduced traction. As a rule of thumb, bad weather increases your
risk of a crash between 70 and 80 percent.
The main reasons for the increased risk are usually visibility or traction—or
both. Let’s start with visibility. Almost every year, somewhere in some state
there is a huge pileup on a foggy interstate. The issue in such cases is not

traction but visibility. Complicating matters is the added variable of drivers
encountering the unexpected. In a nutshell, drivers don’t really expect to see
stopped cars on the interstate, so they often don’t adapt enough to that pos-
sibility, even in heavy fog. If you think about a 50- or 60-vehicle pileup, a sig-
nificant number of those drivers never expected to find stopped vehicles in
front of them. Consequently, they didn’t adapt enough to the fact that they
couldn’t see.
When driving in low-visibility conditions, think about how far ahead you can see and
the effect this has on your ability to stop in a timely manner.
At VTTI we have a group of test tracks collectively called the Smart Roads on
which we can make fog (as well as rain and snow). We are often asked to do
fog research aimed at finding ways to slow people down when they can’t see.
My friend and colleague Ron Gibbons conducts a lot of this visibility research
for the VTTI Center for Infrastructure-Based Safety Systems. Based on that
research, I have four pieces of advice if you find yourself in a low-visibility
situation:

1. Slow down. Think about how far you can see ahead of you and the
effect this has on your ability to stop in a timely manner. In order to
stop in a timely manner, you don’t want to drive faster than you can
process the potential hazards ahead. As you will learn throughout this
book, this usually means driving more slowly than you probably thought
necessary in order to make a stop.
2. Focus on the road ahead. Actively search for any signs of cars ahead,
even though it’s not particularly pleasant to stare into a uniform scene
of fog or snow. Don’t get distracted, and don’t look away from the road.
3. If your lights are off, turn them on—in most cases on low beam. This not
only helps you see a bit better but also makes you more conspicuous to
drivers behind you.
4. Don’t become a target that others can’t see. In general, this means stay-
ing out of the left lane. If you are going really slow, turn on your emer-
gency hazards so that you are more conspicuous to those traveling
behind you. If you need to stop, move over to the shoulder if you can.
The other part of the bad weather equation is traction. My first job out of
college was working as a human factors engineer for a large aerospace com-
pany. I lived in the mountains of Colorado and commuted each day down the
aforementioned Highway 285 to the suburbs just west of Denver. For those
of you who haven’t experienced living and commuting at a high altitude, con-
cepts like “southern exposure” are very important when you live at 9,000
feet. This mostly meant that my house had snow around it until the end of
May, while my neighbor across the street was enjoying bright, spring-like
weather in mid-March because he faced south. It also meant that I did plenty
of winter driving, which gave me ample opportunity not just to observe but
to participate in bad weather conditions made worse by big uphill and down-
hill stretches.
One particular observation stands out from those days. Many of the com-
muters along Highway 285 had big pickup trucks with oversized tires and
four-wheel drive. Admittedly, the knobby tires and extra drive wheels were
handy in that they enabled drivers to get through some slick spots and deep
snow. It’s a misconception, however, that such trucks stop faster or steer
better than any other car or truck traveling at highway speeds while going
downhill on an icy road. If you think about it, even a two-wheel-drive car or
truck has brakes on all four wheels. A newer car has anti-lock brake systems

(ABS) and maybe even electronic stability control (ESC). The point is ground
clearance and four-wheel drive do not help you stop faster on ice. This is
why, during my Highway 285 adventures, I often came across four-wheel-
drive trucks stuck in the median, against the guardrail, or in the ditch. It was
a good day when they were still “shiny side up.”
Fog production on the Smart Road at VTTI.
When traction is low, you have to think a lot about momentum. Momentum
is the quantity of motion of a moving object, mathematically defined as mass
(weight) times speed. Momentum can be your best friend, and it can be
your worst enemy. Essentially, if you are driving in a straight line on a very
slick road, your vehicle will tend to keep going straight and remain at the
same speed. Steering and braking are much less effective in such a scenario
because the traction is so low that the tires don’t grip to exert much force,
even if you have a four-wheel-drive truck.
This means you have to do everything ahead of time and in slow motion dur-
ing bad weather. In general, you want to control momentum by driving more
slowly, particularly if the roads are icy. If you are coming to a stop sign, for
example, reduced speed will help you safely maneuver to a stop in a safe
place and not 20 feet into the intersection. Planning ahead will also help

you. Begin to gently brake much farther in advance than you normally would
to avoid skidding. If you are going downhill, reduce your speed even more
and start slowing down even farther in advance because gravity is working
against you, literally pulling you down the hill. The same principle applies
when making a turn. Brake gently and reduce your speed well ahead of a
turn. If you wait too long, you will go straight, no matter what you do with
the brakes or steering wheel.
We have all heard this, but the next time it’s icy, take the family to a big park-
ing lot and practice, practice, practice all of these driving scenarios! Stop as
fast as you can, feeling the beautiful chatter of your ABS and how the vehicle
reacts on a slick surface; spin out and correct a slide; practice stopping at
the right spot.
Of course, there’s another side to the momentum equation. If you are in a

vehicle that is stuck in snow or ice, you will need more momentum to get
free and move forward. You want just enough momentum, but not too much!
This may seem obvious, but I need to emphasize the point because it’s easy
to forget it when you are in the moment. For example, when you are going
up a hill that is slippery, you want to start with a run-and-go at the bottom
of the hill. That is, you want to build sufficient momentum to take you to the
top of the hill without sliding back down. However, remember that when you
reach the crest of the hill, you have to switch very quickly from generating
momentum to losing momentum.
When driving in the winter, if you get stuck in a travel lane, get out of the
car and get to a safe spot on the shoulder, just as you would in the case of
a disabled vehicle. The tendency to want to push the car is only a good idea
if you’re absolutely sure you’re not going to be squished by the next car that
also happens to be traveling on ice!
Finally, a great way to avoid the risk associated with bad weather is to stay
home—if possible. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that we should all
stay home when it’s drizzling outside. Let’s just say that when your local law
enforcement and weather forecaster say to avoid travel due to inclement
weather, you would be wise to heed their advice. Remember, the risk of a
fatal or injurious crash is much higher during bad weather. So again, if you
must drive, then you must adapt! Stay engaged in the driving task, keep your
eyes on the road, and slow down when traction or visibility is limited.

Adaptation 102: When Your Car Is Not Your Car
Another friend and colleague, Mike Perel, worked for NHTSA for more than
40 years until he retired a few years ago. Mike participated in many, many
studies during those years. One study that was particularly important to this
narrative focused on the risk that comes from driving an unfamiliar car or
motorcycle. Mike and NHTSA found that if you are unfamiliar with the car
you are driving, you are two to three times more likely (odds = 2.0–3.0) to get
in a crash compared to driving a car with which you are familiar.
Being unfamiliar with the car means having less than 500 miles of experience
driving the vehicle. This risk applies to new cars, rental cars, and borrowed
cars. However, this fact is becoming more relevant as we enter an era when
ride and car sharing is becoming increasingly popular. This statistic also
applies to motorcycles, which have the same or even a greater risk level.
At least two factors are at play here. First, different vehicles sometimes have
significantly different handling and braking characteristics. The more differ-
ences among the vehicles, such as a compact car versus an SUV, the greater
the risk when you first start driving an unfamiliar vehicle. I have seen a num-
ber of cases during which someone gets into a crash or near crash because
they were driving a friend’s SUV when they had pretty much only driven
small cars in the past.
The second factor has to do with unfamiliar controls. You don’t have to drive
many different cars before you start pulling out your hair trying to figure
out how to turn on the damned windshield wipers when it starts to pour
rain. If you’re like me, you don’t even have to look past your own driveway
to find several vehicles with different controls that present limitless frus-
tration. If you add in all of the unfamiliar controls, you start to realize that
you just spent the better part of a minute trying to figure out how to find
your favorite classic rock or alternative station in a desperate attempt to get
Justin Bieber out of your head.
The problem with unfamiliarity is almost certainly worse with motorcycles,

simply because they vary in so many ways. I talk about this in a later chapter,
but one motorcycle is a completely different animal from the next one. The
horsepower of a Suzuki GSX-R is more than double that of a Harley Electra

Glide! Other than having (mostly) two wheels, they don’t have much else in
common among themselves.
In 2001 I testified before Congress on the safety implications of using cell phones and
other electronic devices while driving. I am flanked by former NHTSA researchers Mike
Perel (left) and Mike Goodman (right).
So … adapt! When you are first driving an unfamiliar vehicle, take a minute
or two to figure out how the most important controls work, such as lights
and windshield wipers. Set the temperature before you put the car in gear so
that you will be comfortable, and set up the stereo so that you are good to
go before you go. Then when you do go, be overly cautious, especially when
making turns and corners. Give yourself more space and time till you’ve had
a chance to adjust to a car that is different from the one you normally drive.
Adaptation 103: When You Are Not Yourself

By now you’ve learned that driving is a highly dynamic activity. The roads,
road conditions, traffic conditions, and even vehicles around you are con-
stantly changing, which means that you need to change with them by reduc-
ing your speed, staying more focused, etc. The other dynamic part of the
equation is you. Sometimes you are a better, more capable, and more

engaged driver than you are at other times. One of the more surprising find-
ings to come out of a VTTI naturalistic driving study was the tremendous
impact emotions have on driver risk. I call it surprising because no other
naturalistic study, to my knowledge, has found emotions to be a risk factor.
However, we determined that if you are visibly emotional while driving—if
you’re sad, angry, crying, or agitated—your risk increases by nearly 10 times
(odds = 10.0) compared to normal driving.
A key to avoiding crashes is understanding and acknowledging those times

when you are disengaged from the primary task of driving and to modify
your behavior accordingly. Here are some tips and advice on doing so:
1. If you have been drinking (within the legal limit and even well below),
taking prescription medication, smoking marijuana, or have any other
impairment, let someone else drive if at all possible. However, if you
have no option, you need to adapt. Adapt before you drive by not doing
whatever it is you are doing for a good, long while prior to leaving.
Essentially, leave later, when you are in a more alert and sober state.
During your drive, adapting means driving slower, minimizing any dis-
tractions, staying engaged while driving, and avoiding areas with heavy
traffic and vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians or bicyclists.
2. If you are experiencing serious stress, your driving ability is likely to be
impaired. Studies have shown that drivers under interpersonal, marital,
vocational, or financial stress are nearly four times more likely (odds =
4.0) to be involved in a crash than those who are not under such stress.
Big sources of stress include tragedies in your life (death of a loved one,
divorce or marital separation, or serious illness) as well as other life-
changing events (marriage, pregnancy, retirement, or buying a new
home). It’s important to be aware of these changes and understand that
they may affect your driving. If you know of someone going through a
tough time or a life-changing event, offer to drive them. If you are the
one experiencing a stressful time, focus on staying engaged in driving,
take extra time to get to your destination, stop more often during a
long trip, drive slower, and leave more time and space around you. Bet-
ter yet, simply remove yourself from the driving task and ask a friend or
family member to drive.
3. Be prepared to adapt more as you grow older. As the overall population
of the US ages over the next 25 years, the driving population will also

age. Most of us want to maintain our mobility as long as possible, but
this comes with risks. A key to maintaining mobility is to adapt to your
changes in capability. Fortunately, older drivers tend to do a good job of
adapting for a long time. I’ll discuss senior driver issues later in the
book, so look for more key points in that chapter.

5. Do Not Mix Mind-Altering
Substances with Driving
I often ask my transportation safety classes and other groups, “What is the
most dangerous, mind-altering substance when it comes to driving?” Almost
invariably, they say, “Alcohol.” Sometimes I get an occasional answer of “LSD”
or “shrooms” in my college classes, although I am not sure those answers
come from a scientific source. Interestingly, marijuana is seldom mentioned.
I will talk about this later, but in general I suspect that my students under-
stand that it’s difficult to get into a crash while sitting on the couch eating
cheese puffs. However, when all factors are considered, I believe that the
most dangerous mind-altering substance is testosterone.
Battle of the Sexes

Who has the most testosterone? Young males. Who are the riskiest drivers
by a wide margin? Young males. Notice I said “riskiest” and not “worst.” Many
young males will argue fervently against this claim (largely in my opinion
because they are laden with testosterone). As young males often do, they
will talk about performance criteria, such as reaction time or their ability
to take curves faster or their ability to drive in snow. Unfortunately, perfor-
mance and skill do not matter as much in reducing crash risk as judgment,
and young males are more prone to errors in judgment. Some of the most
common judgment errors involve the following:
• Driving faster
• Driving with shorter headways (tailgating)
• Driving impaired due to alcohol
• Engaging in distracting tasks, such as texting
• Engaging in distracting tasks at the worst possible times (intersections,
taking curves, etc.)
I should mention that gender makes no difference whatsoever when it comes

to driving ability, but the same cannot be said of driver judgment. While
young females undertake some of the same bad driving habits as males, they

do so less often as a population. Still, if you are a female and you choose to
engage in these risky behaviors, you will be at just as much risk as your male
counterparts.
Dude, Where’s My Car?

Driving over the legal alcohol limit is always a bad idea. Alcohol reduces
inhibition, increases self-confidence and susceptibility to social influence,
reduces attention, promotes secondary task engagement, and reduces reac-
tion time. All of these traits are bad for driving, which is why your odds of
being in a fatal crash at the legal BAC limit of 0.08 percent are about seven
times higher (odds = 7.0) than when you drive sober.
For my daughter, who is 120 pounds soaking wet, that means no more than
two glasses (5 oz. each) of wine in an hour. For me (a svelte 185 pounds …
or so), that means no more than four glasses of wine in an hour. At a BAC
above 0.08 percent, the odds climb to very high levels. At about twice the
legal limit (0.15 percent BAC), your odds of being in a fatal crash skyrocket
300 to 600 times higher (odds = 300.0–600.0) depending on your age and
gender.
Never, never, never let anyone drive a car who is in this kind of shape. A BAC
of 0.15 percent essentially means doubling the above alcohol allowance num-
bers for my daughter and me (that is, four servings for her in an hour, and
eight for me). And the younger you are, the greater the risk of a fatal crash
when at an increased BAC level. If you are female, you are at greater risk of a
fatal crash than your male counterparts when your BAC level increases. (This
is the only time in this book that such can be said of female versus male dri-
vers.) In most cases, the risk level is extreme, ending in the death of the dri-
ver. With any luck at all, you will just kill your fool self and no one else while
driving under the influence. If you kill someone else, it only gets worse.
Pop quiz: Is it better to (a) take 1,000 cab, Uber, or Lyft rides home or (b) drive
drunk once and end up with a DUI? They cost about the same. Think about
it. For most folks, a DUI equates to a lifetime of being chauffeured around.
For example, if you decide to drink heavily once per week away from home,
you can take a cab home for the next 20 years at the same cost of one DUI.
How can you tell if you need a cab? You can get a free BAC calculator app for
Do Not Mix Mind-Altering Substances with Driving | 57

your smartphone, or you can buy a cheap pocket Breathalyzer. You can even
calculate your BAC in your head; the only complicating factors are portion
size and alcohol content (think big glasses of wine or strong beers). But the
moral of the story is just don’t drive drunk. Period.
Your odds of being in a fatal crash at the legal blood alcohol limit of 0.08 percent are
about seven times higher than driving sober. Don’t risk it!
Around our small college town, we occasionally see a guy riding around on
a 49.5cc motor scooter. He is the classic example of a character I refer to as
“DUI-Guy.” Typically, DUI-Guy is between the ages of 20 and 40. You might
think this guy is environmentally conscious or is trying to save money on gas
… until you pass the same guy in a rainstorm or in the winter on icy roads.
Then you think, well, this guy must have been convicted of driving under
the influence of alcohol, and the only way he can get around is on a scooter
because it doesn’t require a driver’s license, license plate, or insurance. Fre-
quently, DUI-Guys wear full-face helmets. Do you think it’s because they are
super safe or because they don’t want anyone to know who they are? I’ll let
you be the judge.
The good news about DUI-Guy is that he probably didn’t kill or injure some-

one while driving drunk (vehicular homicide). He’s not in jail for the rest of his
life, forced to dwell every day on the person or persons he injured or killed.
There is a really important point here, because even with all of the DUI
penalties and improved enforcement, one-third of fatalities in the US still
involve alcohol. Either stay home; take a cab, Uber, or Lyft; or get someone
sober to drive you home.
An interesting aside to this conversation is a recent event that happened to

me. While listening to a band where my daughter works (the Georgia The-
atre in Athens, Georgia; you should go!), I called for an Uber to give me a ride
home. However, that Uber was erroneously taken by a really drunk dude with
apparently the same first name as mine. No harm, no foul. My wife called
for another Uber on her phone, and we got home okay with the intention of
straightening it out with Uber the next morning. In the meantime, I received
an email with a hefty clean-up fee because the guy hurled in the Uber driver’s
car. Because of the nature of my alleged behavior, waiting until the next day
didn’t help my case, but Uber and I eventually worked it out. The (admittedly
non-safety-related) moral to the story is to get such events straightened out
immediately by calling the driver.
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: Part 1

This first installment of “Just Because You Can” is aimed at those who choose
to drive after drinking alcohol, even though they may be within the legal BAC
limit. As a rule of thumb, the odds of a fatal crash nearly double (odds = 2.0)
with every BAC increase of 0.02 percent.
For most of us, a 0.02 percent BAC is one drink. With two drinks, the odds
double again. Those odds are still higher for young drivers. Driving at half of
the legal limit (BAC = 0.04 percent) puts you at four times the risk (odds =
4.0) compared to driving sober. These are really high odds. That’s why some
countries, like Germany, have set their legal BAC limit at 0.05 percent for
adults. So again, get the most sober person to drive home or take a cab, Uber,
or Lyft.
To give you a better sense of the crash risk for differing BAC levels, our
friends at NHTSA published an excellent study that includes this table:

BrAC Relative Risk Unadjusted and Adjusted for Age and Gender
BrAC Unadjusted Risk Adjusted Risk (Age and Gender)
0.00 1.00 1.00
0.01 0.51 0.54
0.02 0.82 0.85
0.03 1.17 1.20
0.04 1.57 1.60
0.05 2.05 2.07
0.06 2.61 2.61
0.07 3.25 3.22
0.08 3.98 3.93
0.09 4.83 4.73
0.10 5.79 5.64
0.11 6.88 6.67
0.12 8.11 7.82
0.13 9.51 9.11
0.14 11.07 10.56
0.15 12.82 12.18
0.16 14.78 13.97
0.17 16.97 15.96
0.18 19.40 18.17
0.19 22.09 20.60
0.20+ 25.08 23.29
Note: (Relative to BrAC = .00)
A few words of explanation are in order. First, this table considers a sample
for all police-reported crashes, not just fatal crashes. This is important
because the numbers in the chart differ than the ones listed previously. This
is because the crashes included are different; it may also be because the data
are relatively recent.
Second, you’ll notice that in cases in which the level of alcohol is low (say,
one drink or less), the odds appear to be less than 1.0. Why do you think that

is? Well, it certainly appears that drivers are adapting to the low alcohol lev-
els, probably because they know they have had a drink and are thus driving a
little more conservatively. Good for them! However, the risk starts climbing
at a BAC of 0.03 percent, with risk increasing significantly beginning around
a BAC of 0.04 percent. Again, depending on your weight and gender, that is
just a drink or two over the course of an hour.
I’m realistic, though. There’s a good chance most of you will forget these
increased odds after a night out with friends or when you feel like you don’t
have any other choice but to drive. But never, never, never drive while over
the legal alcohol limit. And if you are going to drive after a glass or two
of wine, make a conscious effort to adapt. This means driving at a slower
speed, paying closer attention, leaving long headways, and avoiding areas
with pedestrians. In other words, do everything you can to minimize your
risk.
Sometimes You Should Stay Home and Eat Your Cheese

Puffs
When I was in college in the 1970s, my roommate, Rick, and I used to smoke
weed and eat an entire Pepperidge Farm coconut cake. We would walk to
the grocery store, pick one up, and eat it on the way back. It was frozen and
meant to be thawed, but it never got to the point where it thawed. I wonder
why …
The moral to the story? When you get to the point where you want to eat
half of a frozen cake before it thaws, you might be impaired enough that you
don’t need to drive. Fortunately, Rick and I were not motivated to drive dur-
ing these outings, and we could walk. I am guessing that if we were not close
enough to walk, we would have just stayed home and eaten brown sugar out
of the bag.
Despite the fact that marijuana has been around for a long time, we don’t
know a whole lot about how it affects driving. We know that at some level
there is significant impairment, but there hasn’t been a lot of research into
marijuana and driving primarily because it has been illegal, which makes the
research hard to perform. Of course, that’s all changing with the legalization

of medicinal and recreational marijuana in several states and our nation’s
capital, with more states certainly to follow.
So, here we are: We don’t know what the legal marijuana limit should be.
Even if we did know, we don’t have an effective roadside test to measure it
yet, and we don’t really know how it interacts with fatigue and other drugs
such as alcohol. For example, let’s say you consumed alcohol but are below
the legal BAC limit—maybe 0.05 percent, or two to three beers, depending
on your weight. If you were also smoking pot, we don’t know if you are in
worse shape at that point as a driver compared to consuming a fourth beer
that would have put you over the legal BAC limit.
I’ve heard talking heads claim that we’re already seeing an increase in crashes
due to the legalization of marijuana in some states, and a relatively quick
internet search for “increased crashes marijuana” will bring up several
reports that seem to verify this claim. However, I have also seen reports that
find the injury/crash rate has not changed since the legalization of mari-
juana. A few examples of these varied reports can be found in the References
section at the end of this book. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that
advocates on both sides of the issue can find numbers to support their indi-
vidual stances.
In February 2015 NHTSA released results from a study that sought to deter-
mine the crash risk of drug- and alcohol-impaired driving compared to a
control group of drivers. This study put the odds of a crash risk while under
the influence of marijuana between 1.00 and 1.05. Drivers who tested posi-
tive for any legal or illegal drugs, but no alcohol, saw odds of 1.02. It should be
noted that all of these studies tested the bloodstream for the active ingredi-
ent in marijuana, THC. I need to make two points regarding testing for THC:
1. The THC level doesn’t necessarily correlate with how impaired your
driving is.
2. Unlike alcohol, THC remains in your bloodstream for a very long time,
even days or weeks. (This, of course, is why football players and others
take “wizzinators” to pass drug tests for marijuana.)
The upshot is that some drivers tested in the NHTSA study could have been
stoned three days prior and still tested positive for THC. Obviously, the driver
is not still impaired at this point, yet he or she is classified as “drug positive”

in the results. This is undoubtedly why the odds are closer than one might
expect to a risk of 1.0. In fact, they could be much higher, but my point is
that we won’t know this for sure until we have a much better understand-
ing of the risks of marijuana and driving. Our friends at the Insurance Insti-
tute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently found that crash rates increased an
average of about 6 percent following the legalization of marijuana in certain
states. However, these findings are only preliminary because drugs like mar-
ijuana, unlike alcohol, are not tested for post-crash. The increase could be
(and probably is) due in part to factors that go beyond the change in the law.
At VTTI we are trying to help fill this gap in knowledge by conducting nat-
uralistic driving studies specifically focused on the effects of marijuana use
as it relates to driver risk. We recently wrapped up the first such study of
its kind, which involved about 30 drivers in Colorado. While this is a small-
scale study, it’s an important step forward in determining the effects of mar-
ijuana on drivers in the real world. Our researchers found that, even though
drivers experienced a delayed reaction time, the effect was minor. Overall,
the effects on drivers who used marijuana were minimal. While the study did
not consider the effects of alcohol mixed with marijuana, our findings sug-
gest that THC use in general is certainly not going to create bumper cars out
there.
Many questions about marijuana use will take a long time to answer. If you
are a policymaker, please fund our marijuana and driving research (just kid-
ding … sort of). And yes, we need simulator and survey studies to comple-
ment such research. Some of the following research questions need to be
answered: What happens when alcohol use is the primary impairment ver-
sus when marijuana use is the primary impairment? Does marijuana lead to
other risks, such as increased distraction or fatigue? It may sound funny, but
overadaptation and driving too slowly are possibilities with respect to mari-
juana.
Until we have more research conducted in the context of actual driving, we

simply won’t be able to make definitive statements about the impact of mar-
ijuana use on driving. Based on my own (unscientific) observations, however,
I tend to believe that drivers can adapt better to their driving state under the
influence of marijuana than tequila! I say this because I just don’t see many
crashes occurring at more than 100 mph with marijuana-impaired drivers as
opposed to alcohol-impaired drivers. Marijuana-impaired drivers don’t seem

to drive aggressively in general. There is an old joke: Did you hear about the
two stoners in a bar who bumped into each other and got into a fight? Of
course not, they were too busy apologizing!
Unfortunately, all of this means that I am not in a position at this time to esti-
mate your risk of crashing when driving under the influence of marijuana.
This will no doubt change in the next few years, so stay tuned. In the mean-
time, I will give you a few words of advice about how to approach the use of
marijuana with respect to driving:
1. Treat marijuana like alcohol. As our friends at NHTSA say, “If you feel
different, you drive different.” Stay home; take a cab, Uber, or Lyft; or
get someone sober to drive.
2. Marijuana today is a stronger drug than it used to be, so don’t underes-
timate it! It takes very little time or energy to get really stoned. Just a
couple of puffs or vapes can really get you there. There are also many
edible choices that can have both strong and long-lasting effects, even
longer than alcohol. Plan accordingly if you take a trip to the Green
Planet in Denver or the Bulldog in Amsterdam.

6. Be Attentive and Alert
I was once in Key West watching the street performers down by the water-
front. I remember one performer commenting on the risky nature of his job
as he was standing on top of an aluminum pole (not attached to anything)
while juggling five flaming batons. He said he didn’t want to die while per-
forming. Rather, he said he wanted to die as his grandfather did—“peacefully,
in his sleep … not like his passengers.” The “joke” was that the performer’s
grandfather fell asleep at the wheel.
It will come as no surprise to you that driving while drowsy leads to impair-
ment and crashes. For many years, however, the problem was mostly associ-
ated with long-haul truckers, with fatigue being a key ingredient in about 20
percent of truck crashes. Among light vehicles, crashes due to drowsy dri-
ving were initially thought to be in the range of 4 to 8 percent. Today, though,
we have a growing body of naturalistic and crash data showing fatigue to
be an all-vehicle problem, including cars, small trucks, and buses/motor
coaches. Specifically, fatal crashes involve drowsiness about 15 to 20 per-
cent of the time.
The data also show that drowsiness is not limited to the wee hours of the
morning, although that is certainly a peak time. Light-vehicle drivers suffer
drowsiness symptoms during long morning commutes and in the early after-
noon as well. Short-haul truck drivers (think beer or potato chip trucks) tend
to be fatigued the most on Mondays, after experiencing some sleep loss over
the weekend.
For long-haul trucks, the same trends hold true. Drowsiness can occur dur-
ing all times of the day, with several peak times. VTTI researchers performed
a study in the late 1990s that examined drowsiness in single and team long-
haul drivers. The results showed that at pretty much any time of the day or
night, about 4 percent of truck drivers are falling asleep at the wheel. We’re
talking head-bobbing, eye-rubbing, truck-weaving types of falling asleep.
That sounds like a pretty small percentage until you begin to count the num-
ber of trucks you encounter on your next family vacation. The interstate
nearest my house, I-81, has periods during which traffic is more than 50 per-
cent trucks. It is common for me to encounter more than 100 trucks during a
| 65
four-hour drive to Washington, DC. On average, such a trip puts me in close
proximity every hour to a 40-ton vehicle where the driver is falling asleep
at the wheel! It’s a scary thought but is one more reason to stay away from
trucks. As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, if you are going to pass a truck,
risk a small ticket and pass it briskly.
Regardless of the vehicle you drive, your crash risk increases at least 2 times
with any level of drowsiness (odds = 2.0) and between 4 to 40 times (odds =
4.0–40.0) when you drive at a “moderately” drowsy level or higher, depend-
ing on how tired you are. A moderate level of drowsiness is when you are
beginning to struggle to stay awake and find yourself yawning, rubbing your
face, and moving around in the seat more than normal. Another important
symptom of drowsiness is what we call slow eyelid closures. Unlike a quick
blink, a slow closure is like it sounds: the eyelid droops slowly over the eye
and then is opened. If you experience slow eyelid closures and perhaps head
nods, it’s past time to find a safe place to pull over and rest. After all, it’s hard
to drive with your eyes closed.
My colleague Justin Owens, who works in the VTTI Center for Vulnerable
Road User Safety, recently led a study using our largest naturalistic driving
database (3,500 drivers) to determine the presence of drowsy driving. The
results showed that in nearly 10 percent of crash cases, drowsy driving was a
factor, with driver risk increasing up to 3.8 times (odds = 3.8) due to drowsy
driving.
For my master’s thesis, I studied the causes of drowsiness while driving. With
the help of my adviser, Walt Wierwille, and lab mate Lenora Hardee, we set
out to see if we could develop algorithms that detected when a driver first
became drowsy and to warn that driver via a chime and “telltale” icon on
the dash that it was time to take a break. The study found that the pat-
tern of sleep onset came in bouts of drowsiness lasting a few minutes fol-
lowed by a period during which the drivers were able to wake themselves
up for a little while. Even though our drivers were sleep deprived, the first
bout of drowsiness did not occur for about 15 or 20 minutes. With each suc-
cessive bout of drowsiness, the amount of recovery time declined and the
time between bouts became shorter. These symptoms characterize what we
call sleep inertia. Simply stated, a body needs sleep. While you can delay the
onset of drowsiness for a little while—with coffee, energy drinks, conversa-

tion, music, or cold air—the urge and need for sleep will eventually over-
whelm those small arousing influences.
What do you do when you feel yourself becoming drowsy while on the road?
Frankly, you really don’t have many options, and all of them require you to
do one thing first—pull off the road immediately! What you do next depends
in part on whether you are alone or with other people. If you are alone, your
best, and often only, bet is to take a nap. If you are not alone, you can turn
the driving over to another person in the car. However, this only works if you
have someone else with you who is (a) licensed to drive, (b) more alert than
you, and (c) willing to take the wheel. If any one of these three things is not
the case, then do yourself a favor and take a nap.
My good friends Bob and Rick once traveled cross-country to Boston.

Because Bob had just been at a party, Rick took the wheel first when they
began driving at midnight, leaving Bob to sleep in the back. As Bob recalled,
dawn was just breaking when he was roused from his slumber by the sound
of the car hitting gravel and Rick muttering that he couldn’t stay awake
anymore. Rick pulled over to let Bob take the wheel. Bob said he was fine,
although he was clearly still in the process of waking up. Rick climbed into
the back of the car, and off they went. About 15 minutes later, Bob was enjoy-
ing the nice, warm sun on the car … a little too much. As Bob said, it was like
the scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation when the Griswolds were all asleep
in the Truckster, including Clark, the driver.
Bob quickly woke up when he mowed into a small pole. He yanked the wheel
and jammed on the brakes, sending the car into a 360-degree spin. Rick was
snapped out of his dreams by the sound of the squealing tires and sat up just
in time to catch the flash of an abutment passing by. They managed to come
to a halt pointing in the right direction, so Bob dropped the car into first
gear and started driving again. Apparently, Rick didn’t agree that Bob was fit
to continue driving, so they changed shifts again. They both made it to their
destination, wide awake and ready for action. The point here is that the nap
you take must overcome the sleep inertia, meaning you need to allot time for
both the nap and to wake up!
Anyone is susceptible to sleep inertia while driving, but some people are
more susceptible than others. According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC), more than 70 million folks in the US suffer from some
Be Attentive and Alert | 67

type of sleep disorder, such as sleep apnea. You may have sleep apnea and
not be aware of it. If you are a male, one quick way to tell if you may be at risk
of sleep apnea is to measure your neck size. If it’s 17 inches or more, there’s
a good chance you have sleep apnea. If you snore a lot or people tell you
it sounds like you stopped breathing when you snore, you may have sleep
apnea. If any of this sounds familiar, consider consulting your doctor to find
appropriate treatments. There are also the garden-variety insomniacs, like
me, who spend hours awake in the middle of the night thinking about how to
write a book …
The important point here is that, for some, sleep inertia can come on quick
and hard. You need to pay attention to your alertness level, take a nap when
you need it, and get to your destination in one piece with no scratches on
your car (or worse!).
Distracted Driving Versus Engaged Driving (or Pay

Attention!)
We now know more about driver behavior than ever before. Much of this
is due to the advent of naturalistic driving studies. You’ll remember that
naturalistic driving studies enable researchers to observe volunteer drivers
while in the act of driving. What makes this observation possible is a suite of
inconspicuously placed cameras, sensors, and radar. Thanks to these studies,
researchers can finally see what drivers are doing during the seconds lead-
ing up to a crash or near crash. This information allows us to estimate the
risk involved in engaging in secondary tasks, such as eating a burger, dialing
a phone, reading the newspaper, or applying makeup, while driving. Out of
this research comes the notion of “engaged driving.”
What is engaged driving? In essence, it means staying focused on driving and

avoiding distraction. Our friends at State Farm convened a panel of experts to
write a series of papers on engaged driving back in 2014. I participated in the panel,
along with my friend, former student, and colleague Charlie Klauer, who heads
our VTTI teen-driving research. I wrote one of the papers based on data gathered
from four of our naturalistic driving studies. These studies focused specifically on
adults, teens, trucks, and cell phone use. Some odds from this paper are included
in the next section of this chapter.

One major finding of these studies was that distraction is a key ingredient
in all types of crashes. While this might not sound like news, the fact is that
distraction as a cause of crashes has been underestimated for many years,
similar to the way drowsiness was (and still is) underestimated among car
drivers. Naturalistic driving studies show that, more than 50 percent of the
time, drivers are doing something else while driving. The primary reason
that previous studies underestimated distraction is that it’s nearly impossible
to accurately determine the presence of distraction based on police crash
investigations. After a crash, drivers can be dead, injured, or dazed, may not
remember what happened, or may be lying about what actually happened.
What percentage of drivers who are involved in a crash while using their
phones will admit doing so to an investigating officer? I would guess that it’s
in the ballpark of 50 percent.
Eyes Forward, Hands on the Wheel

All of the VTTI naturalistic studies, as well as similar studies conducted else-
where, show a recurring theme. The greatest distraction-related crash risks
occur when the driver’s eyes look away from the road ahead, for whatever
reason, in conjunction with an unexpected event happening simultaneously.
In other words, a crash is imminent if both these key ingredients are present
to make our figurative cake. If I could give you one piece of general advice
about driving safety, it would be to keep your eyes on the road!
Visual distraction is nothing new. For many years, the classic example was
manually tuning a radio. Most of us with a good bit of mileage probably know
someone who had a crash or near crash while tuning a radio, inserting a CD,
or plugging in/changing the music on an iPod. I know a few.
One peculiar example of a crash caused by visual distraction involved my

good friend Bob, who was traveling on an unfamiliar road at night in his VW
Beetle. While looking down to find a good radio station, Bob missed a sharp
turn. His car launched onto a large shrub, with all four wheels off of the
ground. If that wasn’t bad enough, when Bob landed on the shrub, the muf-
fler of his car got knocked off and his hand knocked the blaring aftermar-
ket radio out of the dash and into the trunk (the engine was in back). The
radio wasn’t wired through the ignition and the car was high enough off the
ground that Bob, unfortunately, couldn’t get into the trunk to turn down the

radio. His blaring radio made it difficult to go unnoticed, even in a very rural
location. Eventually, Bob was able to turn off the radio and get a ride home,
only to have a visit from the local sheriff the next morning.
Visual distraction has become an even greater concern now that we have
wireless devices like smartphones to draw our attention away from driving.
The fact that smartphones are even called phones anymore is really a mis-
nomer; you can do so many very distracting things with them outside of just
making a call.
One of the best ways to stay focused on the road is to mind your inner clock.
More specifically, you need to develop an alarm in your head that goes off
any time you look away from the road for more than two seconds. If you are
able to do this consistently, you will halve your crash risk. Put another way,
you double your risk of crashing when you look away from the road for
more than two seconds.
Our friends at NHTSA and the Auto Alliance both agree with this two-second
rule. The graph below from a VTTI study illustrates the point, with the x-axis
indicating seconds and the y-axis indicating your odds of crashing.
The level of risk if you take your eyes off the forward roadway longer than two seconds.
Here’s a tip to practice while you are driving: when you choose to do some-
thing outside of the main driving task, count “thousand one, thousand two”
and see if your eyes are back on the road. Do the same when you are riding
with others, especially younger drivers, and provide them with this sage

advice. Even though your advanced knowledge of driving safety may seem
unappreciated at the time, those you tell will at least think about this two-
second rule and may even begin to do it. You also need to avoid looking away
from the road more than a few times while performing a nondriving task.
This is another dimension to the “eyes-off-the-road” rule that you need to
think about. Pay attention to the number of times you look away from the
road, even when you are looking away for short periods of time.
Even with short glances away from the road, your awareness of your sur-
roundings decreases. The probability of a crash occurring due to an unex-
pected event increases with each glance away from the road. The work
conducted at VTTI continuously proves the point that taking your eyes off
the road for more than six seconds, even in multiple short glances, begins
to significantly increase your crash risk.
If you follow the two-second rule advice, this means taking three glances
away from the forward roadway. I would say this is the maximum amount
of time you should take your eyes away from the road, but such time also
greatly depends on where you are driving. If you’re on a rural interstate in
Kansas on a sunny, dry day with no other traffic around, you are probably
okay taking a few short glances that total 10 or 12 seconds. If you are on the
Washington, DC, beltway in heavy traffic during a torrential rainstorm, just
wait until you are stopped or are safely at home before you perform any sec-
ondary task that takes your eyes off the road at all. (Remember: adapt!)
With all of this information in mind, the following numbers provide some
“best-guess” crash risk estimates for common secondary (that is, distracting)
tasks performed while driving. The data are based on the State Farm paper
I mentioned above. While these numbers may change as we get more data, I
doubt they will change much, and I don’t expect the factors shown as being
the most or least risky will change at all.

Best-guess odds of crashing while “doing other stuff” at the same time
Distracted Teen vs. Distracted Teen vs.

Adult
Attentive Teen Attentive Adult
Cell texting 5.0 6.0 10.0
Cell dialing 5.0 5.0 6.0
Cell reaching 4.0 6.0 8.0
Cell browsing 3.5 4.5 5.5
Cell talking 1.5 2.0 2.5
Talking on handheld 2.2 N/A N/A
1.0
Talking on hands-free (maybe 1.0+ 1.0+
less!)
Vehicle (radio, A/C, etc.) 1.5 2.5 3.0
Reading (paper map,

10.0 8.0 12.0
other)
Applying makeup 2.0 4.0 6.0
Eating 1.5 3.0 4.0
Drinking (nonalcohol) 1.3 2.5 3.0
Actively talking to
1.2 2.0 2.5
passenger
Looking at outside object,

5.0 8.0 12.0
person, etc.
Dispatching device
(commercial drivers only)
10.0 N/A N/A
Several points are worth making here:
1. You can’t drive safely if you aren’t looking at the road. Visual tasks that
may also require a manual component, or what we call visual/manual
secondary tasks, have the highest crash risk. This includes dialing, tex-
ting, reaching for a phone or any other object, or reading.
2. Talking on a cell phone can be a distracting secondary task, depending
on your use of a handheld or hands-free phone. As you probably noted in
the chart above, there is a difference in risk between talking on a hand-
held phone and talking on a (well-designed) hands-free phone, with the
latter actually showing a protective effect (that is, an odds of less than

1.0), at least relative to adult drivers. This probably has to do with the
act of holding the phone, which of course is absent when talking on a
hands-free phone. The act of holding the phone means drivers only
have one hand on the wheel, making maneuvers more difficult. Holding
the phone to one’s ears also decreases one’s searching and scanning
abilities.
3. Teens are susceptible to more types of distractions than adults. Eating,
drinking, interacting with passengers, and using the A/C or radio
appear to be somewhat higher-risk scenarios for teens when compared
to adults. This suggests the driving task itself requires more attention
from teens because they are new at it. Consequently, teens are more
likely than adults to get sucked into the secondary tasks and forget
about the primary task—driving! The very fact that teens start out with
a crash rate three times higher than adults further highlights how risky
secondary tasks are for teens.
4. The distraction effect is not nearly as large for any of the drivers for
tasks that require very few glances away from the road. Which brings us
to our next topic …
What About My Talking Car and My Talking Phone?

Drivers can now perform numerous tasks hands-free via Bluetooth or other
built-in systems. The most popular task is probably navigation, but you can
also manipulate the temperature, radio, messaging, etc., of the vehicle via
voice-only interactions. However, it’s essential that any hands-free system
you use is well-designed. A critical component of a well-designed hands-free
system is that it uses voice instead of a visual display to communicate infor-
mation back to you. Again, looking at the road is critical. Anything you can do
to keep your eyes on the road while driving will reduce your crash risk.
Plenty of studies show no benefit to using a poorly designed hands-free

operation when compared to performing the same task manually and visu-
ally. One such study conducted by VTTI in the late 1990s by Andy Gellatly, a
former student, supported this conclusion. The study was designed to assess
an earlier version of voice dialing. The system was inaccurate to the point
where the driver had to look at the dashboard after voicing every number
to see if the system had entered the number correctly. If the number was

wrong, the driver had to manually correct it. The study also found that the
faulty voice command system actually created more risk than manual dialing
because it took the driver’s eyes off the road more than manual dialing!
Wait, Where Am I?
Distraction isn’t always visual. Your mind can easily wander and get lost in
thought. All of this falls under the umbrella of what we call cognitive distrac-
tion. Generally speaking, cognitive distraction does not place visual/manual
demands on the driver. A driver may have his or her eyes on the forward
roadway but may be thinking about (not actively doing) something else. The
concept probably isn’t new to you; many of us spend a lot of time in a car,
and driving is often mundane, so we do many things to keep our minds occu-
pied. We make phone calls; truckers use CB radios; we listen to audiobooks,
music, news, conversations, and podcasts. In fact, more than 50 percent of
the time, drivers are doing something in addition to driving. The percent-
age increases to 70 percent just prior to crashes.
At VTTI we analyze a lot of video of people crashing in real-world settings.

Thanks to our naturalistic driving studies, we have captured more than 2,000
crashes using multicamera systems that typically involve four to five cam-
eras. In these videos, rarely do we see a case during which someone is look-
ing directly at something and runs into it. (Although, on occasion, we do see
someone miss a traffic signal or stop sign.) By contrast, we see hundreds of
cases involving drivers engaged in visual/manual distractions who take their
eyes off the road and then subsequently crash. This indicates that, relatively
speaking, cognitive distraction is less risky than visual/manual distraction.
How “less risky” is cognitive distraction? At VTTI we have worked on several

studies trying to answer this very question. In one study we tried to deter-
mine how prevalent cognitive distraction was among drivers. To do this,
we focused on secondary tasks that can be considered mainly cognitive in
nature: talking or singing alone or with a passenger, talking or listening on
a handheld cell phone, talking or listening on a hands-free cell phone, and
dialing hands-free using voice-activated software. We found that drivers
were engaged in such cognitive secondary tasks about 20 percent of the
time while driving. However, we also found that engaging in such tasks did
not generally increase crash risk compared to everyday driving (although the

risk went up slightly when only compared to alert, attentive, and sober dri-
vers, but it’s important to keep in mind that crash risk will typically always
be higher when comparing to this group because they represent the “best of
the best” cases—what we call model driving—on the road).
In another VTTI study, we attempted to understand the degree to which

“cognitive disengagement” leads to crashes. Cognitive disengagement
includes cases in which the driver may be “zoned out” and not thinking about
driving at all. During this study, we assessed three types of cognitive disen-
gagement: (1) purely cognitive distraction, where the driver was performing a
cognitive secondary task and did not look away from the road; (2) mind wan-
dering, where the driver was just thinking about something else; and (3) a
small amount of fatigue called microsleep. We analyzed only the cases where
no other figurative cake ingredient was present—like texting or looking away
from the road longer than two seconds—but the driver’s reaction to the crash
showed signs that he or she was not cognitively engaged with the driving
task, such as a slow brake reaction time.
What did we find here? Well, we determined that less than 1 percent of
crashes examined had mind wandering or microsleep as a main ingredient in
the crash; about 1.5 percent of crashes had purely cognitive distraction as a
main ingredient. That’s not to say cognitive distraction was altogether absent
in crashes; rather, cognitive distraction was not found to be a primary factor
in the crash. More often than not, for all the thousands of crashes we have
seen, the crash was primarily due to the driver looking away from the for-
ward road because he or she was visually or manually distracted by some-
thing else or because the driver was nodding off at the wheel.
Obviously, anything that presents some kind of risk to the driver is a safety
issue. However, relative to visual/manual distraction or fatigue, cognitive
distraction does not appear to present that much of a risk.
Along these lines, you may hear that talking on any kind of cell phone is con-
sidered a form of cognitive distraction because your eyes are on the road
compared to when you are, say, texting. You may hear that performing such
a task is significantly risky to you as a driver. However, there are a few bits
of information to keep in mind here. If you are an adult driver, the risk of
crashing while talking on a handheld cell phone is about 1.5 (odds = 1.5). For
novice drivers, the risk increases to about 2.5 (odds = 2.5). If you are texting

on a phone while driving, your crash risk increases between 4.0 and 23.0
times (odds = 4.0–23.0), depending on vehicle type and driver.
Yes, a handheld cell phone conversation does increase your crash risk. How-
ever, if you’re wondering to yourself, “Wait, these are handheld phone con-
versations; isn’t the handheld part a manual task in some sense?” I would
reply, “Hold on a minute …”
An interesting study performed by our friends at the IIHS used the VTTI
100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study data to determine that engaging in cell
phone conversations while driving does not significantly increase crash risk.
The IIHS made this statement because drivers typically cognitively disengage
from driving simply by doing something, even if they aren’t involved in a cell
phone conversation. It has become popular to debate the risk of a cell con-
versation while driving as a main type of cognitive distraction. There are
advocates you may hear in the news who will say that it’s incredibly risky.
They will argue that a cell phone conversation can be more “emotional” or
that the driver is compelled to keep the phone conversation going even when
driving demands 100 percent attention because the other person is not in
the driving “context” and to interrupt the conversation seems “rude” to the
driver. I would counter by saying that lumping all types of cell phone conver-
sation into one general statement—that talking on a cell phone is dangerous
to you as a driver—is misleading.
For example, the VTTI cognitive studies found that talking or listening on
a hands-free cell phone did not increase driver risk. In fact, we found zero
crashes in the largest naturalistic driving study ever conducted (3,500 drivers
for up to two years) associated with having a hands-free phone conversation.
Now, what about having a conversation on a handheld phone? That is where
we see increased risk—presumably because the very act of talking on a hand-
held phone requires holding the phone, thereby leaving the driver with one
hand on the wheel and decreased ability to visually scan his or her driving
environment.
The great state of Georgia (which is suddenly a bastion of driving safety;

congratulations to all of you, including your lawmakers) recently passed
a hands-free law, meaning that it’s illegal to talk, browse, or text on any
handheld device while driving. We have been advocating for such laws for
almost 20 years! Thus far, the initial crash stats coming out of Georgia back

up our assertions. In 2018 the Georgia State Patrol reported that traffic
crashes declined following implementation of the hands-free law—crashes
were down nearly 9 percent in August 2018 compared to August 2017. Over-
all, the state reported a decline in crash fatalities by 11 percent year-to-date,
the largest decrease in a decade.
The last time I was in Georgia visiting my daughter, Emily, I was surprised
to see that she would not let herself pick up a phone while driving, for any
reason, due to the hands-free law. I was even more surprised when several
of her friends, both male and female, followed suit. That’s a small sample for
sure; however, given that they are all in the 23–25 age range, it’s certainly a
good sign!
If you see advocacy groups post or talk about how much riskier cognitive
distraction is compared to visual/manual distraction, please keep this chap-
ter in mind. There’s no question that the number 1 problem in transportation
safety is drivers taking their eyes off the forward road. However, cognitive
distraction is still something to which we should pay attention (pun
intended). With this in mind, I advise the following to keep you safe and to
minimize your risk of experiencing cognitive distraction: as a driver, stick to
your primary task. One trap that many drivers fall into, particularly novice or
young drivers, is forgetting which of the two (or three, or four) things they
are doing is most important. For example, a cell phone conversation should
always be the secondary task when you are driving. Talking should only be
engaged in while driving under ideal conditions, when traffic is light and
when weather conditions permit. If such driving conditions change—or if you
feel yourself getting sucked into the conversation emotionally (remember,
driving while visibly emotional can also increase your crash risk)—interrupt
the conversation and tell mom, dad, or junior that you’ll call back later. Other
examples of tasks that are always secondary in nature while driving are lis-
tening to music and eating in the car. If situations in the driving environment
become bad or difficult, turn off the stereo, put down the cheese fries, and
adapt to survive.
Navigating Is a Necessary Part of the Driving Task

At this point, you may be asking yourself, What’s wrong with this guy? I have
this TV in the dash of my new Tesla with a map on it, and he’s not even talk-

ing about how distracting it is! To which I say, yes, but have you considered
that navigating to a destination is (presumably) not a secondary task because
you need to know how to get there so you can, in fact, get there? When it
comes to navigating, there is significant risk in the form of more road time
(exposure), missed turns, or searching for signs when you are lost. Navigat-
ing is a necessary part of the driving task.
For my PhD dissertation in 1985 I conducted the first on-road investigation

of the safety associated with the use of an in-car navigation system. With
the help of my adviser and lab mates, we designed an early prototype of an
instrumented vehicle with cameras and other sensors that measured real-
world driving performance. A photo is shown here of that first instrumenta-
tion, which became the basis for the VTTI naturalistic driving study research
method.
Early transportation research instrumentation, which became the basis for the VTTI
naturalistic driving study research method (left). Newer instrumentation that captures
a view of the driver’s face, which can tell us a lot about driver behavior in the real world
(right).
This setup doesn’t look all that sophisticated today, but in 1985 it was beyond
state of the art. In fact, the systems we build now are slightly larger than a
box of playing cards and much more capable than my 1985 version. At the
time the concept of an in-car navigation system was quite new, which meant
that we had no way of knowing what the safety implications were. Given
that navigation was an essential part of the driving task, the question for this
study then became, What is the best way to navigate safely while driving?
After performing the main study described above and several others, includ-
ing a study in the mid-1990s I conducted with my friend and former student
Dan McGehee, using 100 vehicles in Orlando, we found the following:

1. Moving maps that are well-designed are less visually demanding than
paper maps or direction lists.
2. Turn-by-turn screens are less visually demanding than moving maps.
3. Adding well-designed voice commands to either moving maps or turn-
by-turn screens reduce the visual demand placed on the driver.
4. If they work well, voice commands alone are the least visually demand-
ing option.
Notice in the last result that I said voice commands alone are the least visu-
ally demanding, not the least distracting. This is because, again, navigation
is part of the driving task. Essentially, if you have a well-designed voice navi-
gation system, your risk is reduced compared to any other navigation option
available.
Speaking of Attentive and Alert … A Few Tips for

Commercial Drivers
Long-haul trucks constitute only about 10 percent of trucks on the road today.
Commercial trucks that make shorter (local/short-haul) deliveries are more common.
As I was writing this book, I struggled at times to decide what to include

and not to include. For instance, I wasn’t sure what to say about long-haul
or line-haul (that is, big) trucks. I opted not to include heavy trucks from the
trucker’s viewpoint, primarily because the subject is so vast that it could turn
into its own book. The truth is that truck driving is very different from “four-

wheel” driving. Truck drivers have special training; special licenses, such as
the commercial driver’s license; special regulations that include hours of
service; differing laws, such as zero tolerance for alcohol; different medical
requirements; and a different lifestyle that leads to sleep- and health-related
issues, among others. Someday, I may work with my truck and bus colleagues
to write a book about heavy trucks, if this book does okay.
Although we all think of the big long-haul semi-tractor trailers when we

first think of trucks, they actually constitute only about 10 percent of the
trucks on the road today. There are many other commercial trucks that make
shorter deliveries. These local or short-haul trucks do not have to adhere to
many of the same requirements as interstate trucks. In addition, there are
many, many people in the US and around the world whose job it is to drive a
vehicle other than a truck for a living. Think of taxis and limousines, to name
just two.
If you drive for a living, congratulations! You have one of the most dangerous
occupations in the United States! If you are a farmer, rancher, logger, or con-
struction worker and you say, “No way,” I have news for you. Many risks occur
while you are in, or driving, a vehicle. In some cases, professional drivers rival
commercial fishing for the top spot as the most dangerous occupation.
A big reason for your on-the-job risk as a professional driver is your expo-
sure. Throughout this book, you have seen the phrases “crash rate” or “fatal
crash rate” numerous times. The rate is typically per mile traveled; even
when the rate is low, your risk still increases with every mile you drive. And
many of you professional drivers cover a lot of miles. This makes much of the
advice in this book even more important for you.
So, here are just a few tips I want to pass along:
1. While many of you get paid by the mile or trip, don’t let the money or
job pressure make you lose sight of the consequences of your actions
while driving. Some of you carry perishable goods that need to be deliv-
ered in a shorter timeframe than other types of cargo. Some of you are
supposed to make a very large number of sales calls every day, which
means you are more or less expected to work while you drive. Some of
you have to meet an arbitrary deadline, such as, “Will be delivered in 30
minutes or less, or your pizza is free.” Many of you get paid more money

if you can make more trips in the same amount of time. These rules
incentivize professional drivers to drive while distracted, drive while
drowsy, drive as fast as possible, or drive aggressively. As a professional
driver, you must avoid these traps—for your own safety and the safety
of others.
2. Even though you have a high level of practice and skill, you still have to
look at the road. I have been involved in a number of legal cases and
have given congressional testimony about driving distraction. I have
heard arguments that commercial drivers are highly skilled and so well
trained that they can drive while doing other things like reading, writ-
ing, or interacting with dispatching devices. Rich Hanowski and his col-
leagues in the VTTI Center for Truck and Bus Safety have found that,
after cell phone texting, interacting with electronic dispatching devices
is the riskiest activity for commercial drivers. When a commercial dri-
ver is using a dispatching device, he or she is at 10 times greater risk
(odds = 10.0) than when just driving. Many of you need to use such
devices while driving to get your next load or fare, and I get that. But
some of these devices are poorly designed and require you to take your
eyes off the road for too long. Focus on finding ways to do what you
need to do with as few short glances (remember, less than two seconds)
away from the road as possible. If the message on your dispatching
device is long or you have to type, it’s imperative that you pull over in a
safe spot to read or type.
3. No matter how much experience or skill you have, you can’t drive safely
when you look away from the road frequently or for long periods of
time. Take a look at this chapter for more details about what is and isn’t
okay when it comes to driving distraction; the risks outlined there apply
to professional drivers too.
4. Fatigue is a serious issue for many professional drivers. Most of you
aren’t regulated for hours of service, and many of you work long shifts.
This puts you at greater risk for drowsiness than private vehicle drivers.
Remember, if you are tired enough to experience slow eyelid closures
or head bobbing, you just have to take a break and, preferably, a nap.

7. Aggressive Driving 101
Be Kind and Caring
It’s not just you on the road. It’s you plus over 220 million other licensed dri-
vers in the US alone (not to mention unlicensed drivers), as well as bicyclists,
pedestrians, wildlife, and more. In this chapter, I will offer some informed
advice on how to drive more peacefully and safely while you are sharing the
road with others.
Make Love, Not War

Aggressive driving has become a serious issue in the United States—so much
so that NHTSA has funded studies devoted specifically to finding ways to
curb it. (See the reference list at the end of the book.) According to NHTSA,
aggressive driving is “The operation of a motor vehicle in a manner that
endangers or is likely to endanger persons or property.” We have all seen
examples of aggressive driving on the road. Think of the times you’ve been
on the interstate and marveled at drivers tailgating at 70 mph or weaving in
and out of traffic with very close spacing. Most of these offenders are men,
and most of them are younger men, which supports my point about testos-
terone in chapter 5.
Our friends at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety estimate that more than
half of all fatal crashes involve at least one aggressive driver. Of those fatal
crashes, about two-thirds involve excessive speeding. In short, a lot of peo-
ple are killed on the road because others are in too much of a hurry to oper-
ate a vehicle safely within traffic and road conditions.
Thanks to a late 1990s study at the University of Michigan by my colleagues

Bob Ervin and Paul Fancher, I came to understand this kind of behavior bet-
ter. The subject of their study was adaptive cruise control. Adaptive cruise
control allows you to set your following distance, as opposed to regular
cruise control, which lets you only set your following speed. Adaptive cruise
control uses radar to set your headway to the vehicle in front, keeping you at
a constant distance from the car ahead. Once you have clear space in front

of you, the vehicle returns to the set speed, just like cruise control. Using the
data generated from this radar, Bob and Paul found that drivers usually fall
into one of two groups: “hunters” and “gliders.” Hunters are always pushing
the limit, trying to find a faster way to get to where they’re going. Gliders
are generally happy to go with the flow of traffic. I must confess that I am
a hunter, but I wish I were a glider because, frankly, the gliders I know usu-
ally get to their destination nearly as fast as I do but with much less stress.
Of course, being a hunter does not necessarily make you a bad driver. The
problem comes when a hunter is overly aggressive, because overly aggres-
sive drivers put themselves—and others—in danger.
An example of an aggressive driver is a male (again, aggressive drivers are

typically male) traveling on a congested four-lane highway, weaving in and
out of traffic at very close spacing to get to wherever he is headed. However,
he arrives only a minute or two earlier than he hoped because the traffic vol-
ume was such that driving aggressively made little to no difference. Other
characteristic signs of an aggressive driver include passing a bicycle at a
close distance or passing a car on a two-way road with too short of a sight
distance.
Like It or Not, Driving Is a Social Endeavor

Bill Murray summed it up best when he said to his truck-wielding groundhog
companion in Groundhog Day, “Don’t drive angry. Don’t drive angry!” And Bill
was right. Research performed at VTTI shows that driving angry or in some
other elevated emotional state increases your crash risk by nearly 10 times
(odds = 10.0) compared to normal driving.
There will always be hunters on the road; this is a simple fact of life. However,
even hunters can learn when to chill out—when to not become aggressive
and put us all in danger. Take me as an example: I may have needed 25 years,
but eventually I learned that all of my efforts to get ahead in traffic ulti-
mately didn’t speed things up that much. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
plan ahead and look for ways to shorten your trip. It really just means you
should avoid the temptation to engage in extreme driving behavior.
For those of you who are gliders, there are a few simple things you can do to
lessen the dangers associated with aggressive driving.
Aggressive Driving 101 | 83

Bill Murray was right when he told his furry companion in Groundhog Day, “Don’t
drive angry. Don’t drive angry!”
Let’s face it, you are sharing the road with hunters, and they care much more
than you do about getting to their destinations quickly—so get out of their
way. For instance, nothing drives hunters crazier than gliders who stay in
the left lane with their cruise control set on 70.001 mph while traffic in the
right lane is going 70.000 mph. The left lane used to be, and still is in many
countries, the fast or passing lane. For example, hang out in the left lane in
Germany and see what happens. All drivers should move into the left lane
to pass briskly (especially around trucks) and then move back into the right
lane once they have passed. I need to give a shout-out to my home state of
Virginia, as they have recently started putting up variable message signs (the
electronic messaging system) that read, “The Left Lane Is for Passing, Not
for Cruising.” Yay! They display that message because if you’re caught lolly-
gagging in the left lane in Virginia, you’ll be fined $100. I think it should be
$10,000, but hey, it’s a start for hunters like me.
Another way to help lessen the danger for everyone on the road is to use
your turn signal properly. About 10 years ago, VTTI conducted a small survey
in the Washington, DC, area. We asked people about their use of turn signals.

What we found was that roughly 57 percent of drivers did not use signals at
least part of the time. These drivers gave many reasons for failing to do so,
but perhaps my favorite response was “If I signal, other drivers will close the
gap I am trying to get into.” This is a form of aggressive driving behavior that
doesn’t help the situation for all drivers on the road. In the long run it’s better
to be polite. Let others go in front of you; merge out of a closed lane before
you get to the end and avoid slowing everyone down. If someone ahead of
you uses his or her turn signal, make room for that driver and resist “closing
the gap.”
If you are often on the receiving end of various pointed gestures from other
drivers beyond a hand wave, you should look in the mirror—both the one
at home and the rearview mirror in your car. Ultimately, whether you are a
hunter or a glider, you may want to think about how much it costs you to
exercise a little bit of courtesy on the road. I guarantee it’s not much.
My last little piece of socially conscious advice may save you in a more direct
way: dim your headlights at night when cars are approaching from the other
lane. It seems obvious, but I wish I had a dollar for each time I passed a car
or truck with high beams on. If you’ve put a lift kit on your truck (I am from
southwest Virginia, after all), get your headlamps re-aimed.
Vulnerable Road Users

Vulnerable road users is a term used at VTTI and elsewhere to describe
those who are essentially unprotected by steel, shatterproof glass, airbags,
and crumple zones. Bicyclists and pedestrians are the most vulnerable road
users. For obvious reasons, they are more susceptible to injuries and fatali-
ties than those with protection. In recent years, the fatality numbers for vul-
nerable road users have increased. According to NHTSA, both bicyclist and
pedestrian fatalities are on the rise, with the latter seeing a 15 percent jump
in just the past decade.
Most pedestrian and bicycle fatality victims are male (70 percent and 88 per-
cent, respectively), and most occur in urban areas (73 percent and 71 percent,
respectively). The major risk factors for vulnerable road users are conspicu-
ity (how well the vulnerable road user can be seen) and alcohol. Researchers
at VTTI are beginning to focus more on this problem in an effort to assess

risky behaviors that pedestrians are performing on their end that may con-
tribute to increased crash risk.
Around 2018 electric scooters, or e-scooters, quickly descended onto the

transportation scene as a popular ridesharing option. The concept of
scooter-sharing is simple: for next to nothing, you can hop on a scooter
you’ve located via one of several scooter-share programs and zip around a
city that allows scooter-sharing. While it’s difficult to say exactly how many
scooters are out there right now, the most recent data come from Forbes,
which estimates 65,000 scooters operating in cities from San Diego to Austin
to DC.
The benefits of scooter-sharing programs are real, especially in cities

afflicted with traffic congestion. Scooters offer efficient and economical
alternatives to get you to your destination (within reason, as city regulations
often allow scooter usage within a designated parameter). San Francisco,
among other cities, is leveraging the popularity of e-scooters to boost trans-
portation options among low-income populations. These efforts allow
scooter-share companies to double their number of scooters on the road if
they enroll a certain number of individuals on low-income plans.
There are some cons to scooter-sharing, such as scooter riders’ potential

to become a new type of vulnerable road user. While we don’t have good
exposure data yet, a UCLA study published in 2019 examined scooter injuries
based on patients admitted to two different ERs (Santa Monica and Ronald
Reagan UCLA Medical Center) during a one-year span. Of the nearly 250
patients studied, about 230 were scooter riders, with 80 percent of them
sustaining injuries from falls, more than 10 percent from striking an object,
and nearly 10 percent from being hit by a vehicle or object. Impairment was
found to be the cause in about 5 percent of the scooter patient cases. Mean-
while, Atlanta officials have declared a nearly threefold increase in injuries
that require medical attention due to scooters. The CDC and others are cur-
rently conducting studies to better understand scooter safety risks, which
should shed more light on the issue.
Because of the relatively sudden rise of scooter-sharing programs, cities

have been scrambling to get coherent policies on the books to address issues
such as fixing speed limits, riding on congested downtown sidewalks, and
riding while impaired.

The sudden rise of scooter-sharing programs has left many cities scrambling to develop
appropriate rules of the road so that scooter users can operate safely alongside other
vulnerable and non-vulnerable users.
And then there’s the question of helmets. Should cities require them or
enforce any existing helmet laws on the books? Though some scooter-shar-
ing programs offer free helmets, most riders do not use them. The UCLA
study found that less than 5 percent of the studied scooter riders were wear-
ing a helmet, while the ongoing CDC study has already determined that less
than 1 percent of scooter users wear helmets. Still, some cities have actually
loosened their helmet laws, with California enacting a law in January 2019
allowing riders 18 and older to go without a helmet.
There’s some debate in my business as to the longevity of e-scooters. Are

they a fad or are they here to stay? I side with the latter because I believe that
e-scooters fill a real need in the world of transportation. They are fast, con-
venient, and economical. If you’ve ever ridden one (and didn’t get hurt), you
probably agree. But frankly, we have to address the safety issues and come
to terms with their place in the overall transportation picture. With that in
mind, here are a few tips on riding an e-scooter:
1. Always test out the brakes when you first get on.
2. Always make sure both front and rear lights work, even in daylight, to
increase conspicuity.
3. Wear a helmet, whether it’s your own or one offered by the scooter-
sharing program.
4. Ride in bike lanes whenever possible. E-scooters are similar to bikes in

size and speed, and bike lanes offer some level of protection from cars.
However, you need to be aware of bikes so you can avoid them and they
can avoid you.
5. If no bike lanes or other protected lanes are available, ride on the side-
walk when it is safe to do so. “Safe to do so” means that you can effec-
tively and courteously steer clear of all pedestrians.
6. Ride scooters at generally 10 mph or below. At under 10 mph, most folks
can hop off quickly if needed, run along beside the scooter, and then
quickly (and safely) come to a stop. At 15 mph … a face-plant on rough
concrete may be in your future.
7. Pay attention to potholes, cracks in sidewalks, small obstacles, and any
other possible impediment. Otherwise, that tiny little wheel will flip you
off in a heartbeat.
8. Always follow the rules of the road. Just like all travelers, e-scooter rid-
ers cannot violate the expectations of other road users or a crash will
be inevitable.
One certain way to reduce crashes and fatalities is to separate the vulnerable
from the nonvulnerable road users. Sidewalks, bike trails, and bike lanes will
always help reduce fatalities. However, if you have to share the road, below
are a few tips in doing so safely.
For the Nonvulnerable Users

1. Numerous conflicts and crashes occur because the car driver is treat-
ing the vulnerable user like the wrong type of vehicle. Therefore, you
need to have a clear mental model of the kind of vulnerable user with
whom you are interacting. Here is how I tend to classify vulnerable road
users:
◦ Bicycle = Runner
◦ Electric Bicycle = Bicycle
◦ Scooter = Bicycle
◦ Motorcycle or Big Scooter = Car
To make a mental model in your head, you should ask yourself a few
questions. First, does the vulnerable user have the right to an entire

vehicle travel lane, or should he or she be on the shoulder? Second, and
just as important, is the vulnerable user actually in a vehicle travel lane
or on the shoulder? No matter what, you want to give a wide berth if and
when you choose to pass.
2. Be patient; you don’t have X-ray vision. When I am talking to bicycle
enthusiasts, the complaint I probably hear the most is that drivers tend
to pass bicyclists even when there is no way they can see far enough
ahead, often cutting too close or cutting off bicyclists.
Share the road with bicyclists—they are among the most vulnerable road users, even on
city streets with dedicated bike lanes.
For the Vulnerable Users

1. Obey the rules of the road. Don’t violate the expectations of those who
could run over you—especially in intersections! Numerous fatalities
occur in intersections, so make sure you don’t violate signals or run
stop signs.
2. Stay focused and always be aware of those around you! Just like every-
one else on the road, you need to pay attention to the primary task of
biking, walking, or whatever nonvehicular mode of transport you are
using.
3. Be conspicuous! Wear reflective or bright-colored clothing. Make sure
you have a lot of reflectors on your backpack or bike. Use lights and

flashing lights on your bike, both on the front and the back. In general,
assume drivers don’t see you, because they often don’t.

8. Teaching Your Teen to Drive
My friend Doug and I often end up on some kind of adventure with an old
car, truck, or trailer (because we are old and pretty cheap). Doug has coined
a phrase that we use on such adventures: “We need to avoid our 16-year-old
selves.” Even at our age, we have a tendency to not do the safe thing: that is,
not to put a ratchet strap on that mattress in the truck because we are in a
hurry; not to fix the boat-trailer lights; not to worry about the brakes on a
trailer carrying a 6,000-pound boat because we can go slow. Okay, it’s mostly
me who has those tendencies.
The point about avoiding our 16-year-old selves is actually very important.
Especially when you consider the risks of 16-year-old drivers, particularly
16-year-old male drivers. They are not adults, and they don’t drive like adults.
They have not had the life experiences to understand the limitations of being
16 years old, and this puts them at very high risk. Consider the following:
Newly licensed teen drivers are three times more likely to get into a fatal
crash than their adult counterparts. For the first three months after get-
ting a driver’s license, teen drivers are eight times more likely to be involved
in a crash or a near crash. These are huge, scary, and sad statistics. In fact,
teens are more likely to die due to a car crash than they are due to all other
sources of unintentional injury and disease combined. Few teens these days
have not been touched by a crash, either directly or indirectly. Most know a
friend, acquaintance, or classmate who has been killed in a car wreck. If you
are a teen driver, pay attention to this book. If you are a parent or guardian
of a teen driver, pay even closer attention, because this is reality. When it
comes to driving, your life can completely change—or end—in one second.
Over the last decade I have conducted several naturalistic driving studies
of newly licensed teens with my colleagues Bruce Simons-Morton, a recent
retiree from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Charlie Klauer, who
oversees our teen research group at VTTI. One of the most important dis-
coveries we made in our studies is that teens are more knowledgeable about
driving than we tend to give them credit for. By and large teens know how
to handle a vehicle reasonably well, and they know how to drive it safely.
The problem is, despite this knowledge, they often choose not to drive safely.
| 91
This is significant because it sheds light on the age-old debate about teen
drivers: Is the problem that they need more or better driver education and
training, or is it that they need more or better supervision, age, and matu-
rity? Of course, more or better training will always be helpful, but the real-
ity is that teen drivers are at risk because they lack maturity and experience,
thus they need more supervision. (Interestingly, a recent article published
in Pediatrics suggests that states with primary distracted driving laws on
the books—that is, police can pull over a driver specifically for violating a
distracted driving law, like texting while driving—may be another factor in
the safety of teen drivers. In the article, researchers found that teen driver
risk decreased by one-third in states with primary distracted driving laws.)
To illustrate, in one of our studies with Bruce and the NIH, we instrumented
the cars of 42 newly licensed teens for 18 months with unobtrusive cameras
and sensors. The teens all volunteered for the study. As a result, we were
able to gather lots of data from which we drew a number of important con-
clusions about the behaviors of teen drivers. One part of the study focused
on the errors teens make while merging in traffic. We found that, in general,
teens make the same number of errors, or fewer, than adults. In other words,
teens know and follow the rules—such as using turn signals, matching speed,
and checking blind spots—at least as well as adults. Next we measured a
number of specific teen driving behaviors, including braking hard, swerving,
speeding, and “hitting the gas.” At VTTI we call these “risky vehicle-based
driving behaviors.” The higher the rate of these risky driving behaviors, the
higher the likelihood of a crash. As shown in the figure below, teens in this
particular study engaged in these behaviors about four to five times more fre-
quently than the adults … except when teens had an adult in the car. With an
adult in the car, teens exhibited risky driving behaviors at about the same rate
as the adults.
The same was true with other types of risky driving behaviors, such as dri-
ving while distracted. In other words, teens drove like adults when they were
supervised, but they drove like creatures from another planet when adults
were not present. This led us to conclude that most teen drivers know how
to drive safely, but they choose not to. (I know I am being repetitive here, but
we’re big on redundancy in my line of work.)

When we completed our naturalistic study, we were able to classify the teen
drivers as high, moderate, and low risk based on their involvement in crashes
and near crashes. We found that the high-risk group remained high risk,
the moderate-risk group became low risk over time, and the low-risk group
remained low risk the entire time. How do you determine your teen’s risk
group classification? In reality, some teens are risky by nature, while some
are not. It’s hard to know which is which. Risk taking is a very complex thing.
We have all known teens who tend to be risky. However, there are cases
when seemingly low-risk teens have episodes of risky behavior. I have heard
numerous stories of the “model child” who had a beer or two at a party and
crashed a vehicle going 90 mph, or texted while driving and crossed the cen-
ter line, or missed a turn in his or her new sports car and rolled several times.
In short, there’s no magic formula for determining your teen’s risk level. At
the very least, you should be aware of the warning signs of a high-risk driver,
such as being ticketed for moving violations, car damage (even minor), and a
car that is always locked even while in the garage.
If you want to know what high-risk teen driving looks like, I have a story
to tell you that involves risk at an astronomical level. When I was growing
up, I had a friend named Bruce who became a lifelong friend. Bruce was the
ultimate gregarious extrovert and the one who was invariably the life of the
party. Bruce loved cars, motorcycles, speed, girls, and fun—not a great mix-
ture. One fateful night, he was riding his 400cc dirt bike home from a party
with his girlfriend. He was moving at a rapid pace and drew the attention of
a local sheriff in a rural community. Bruce knew some dirt trails in the area,
so rather than get into trouble, he decided to run from the law.
Teaching Your Teen to Drive | 93

Now, boys and girls, there is an old saying about running from the law to
which you should pay attention: “You can’t outrun the Motorola,” meaning
you can’t outpace the radio in every police car. Just so you know, radio waves
travel at the speed of light, which is faster than the speed of a dirt bike. And
there are few things that our good friends in law enforcement hate more
than a high-speed chase. These things never end well.
Bruce did okay for a while, but he soon slid off of the road on a sharp curve
while traveling at more than 70 mph. He narrowly missed some trees that
certainly would have been fatal and slid down a hill to a stop, the bike on
top of him and the exhaust pipe burning his leg. As the sheriff came over the
hill, he witnessed Bruce’s girlfriend beating him with her helmet. The officer
apparently was in no particular hurry at that point to make an arrest. Fortu-
nately, Bruce had one thing going for him. If you remember our cake analogy,
he had one missing ingredient from his cake that surely would have resulted
in a fatal crash: he was wearing his signature Stars and Stripes helmet, which
saved him from what would have been a serious head injury caused by both
the crash and his girlfriend. Amazingly, Bruce avoided extended jail time; he
only had to pay hefty fines and forfeit his license. The reason for this leniency
is the crash occurred during the 1970s in rural Kentucky and not in 2020 any-
where in the United States.
Believe me when I tell you that I am not trying to glorify Bruce’s behavior. He
was literally thousands of times at higher risk of dying during this episode
than he was for the rest of his driving and riding career. It was just a
momentary, very bad decision that teens like Bruce make every day. He lived
through the experience, but for every story like this with a happy ending,
there are a hundred others that end with someone dead or permanently dis-
abled. Bruce himself would be the first to admonish any of his five daughters
or any of his grandkids if they pulled a stunt like that.
After reading a story like this, I’m sure that many of you, especially those who
are the parent or guardian of teen drivers, are wondering what you can do to
ensure your teen’s safety while on the road. Just keep reading …

Training Your Teen to Drive
As a parent, the first thing you should know when your teens reach driving
age is that the car you choose for them can make a significant difference
in determining their risk of being in a fatal crash. Just as you should when
selecting a car for yourself, you should be looking for the crashworthiness
of a vehicle. If families were to put their teen drivers in the newest car they
owned instead of the oldest, it is estimated that the teen fatality rate would
drop by one-third nationwide.
If you want to help your teen driver stay safe, establish firm rules, including no texting
while driving.
According to the IIHS, good cars for teens to drive tend to be newer, have
electronic stability control and multiple other safety features, and are at least
moderate in size and weight (vehicle mass being an important factor in mit-
igating crash risk). Also, a recent finding from a VTTI/NIH study shows that
there is some advantage to sharing a car with your kids rather than buy-
ing them one of their own. Although the risk is similar for both, shared cars
are usually driven less by teens, thus limiting their exposure to crash risk in
general. In fact, VTTI completed a study with several NIH and Johns Hop-
kins colleagues and found that during the first year of licensure, teens with

primary vehicle access drove five times more miles and were four times
more likely to get into a crash or near crash compared to teens with shared
access to a vehicle.
Just some food for thought. Now, assuming you have selected the best car
for your teen that you can afford, what’s next?
When you are a novice at something, chances are you will make lots of mis-
takes. This is true of everything, from basketball to chess to driving. Unfor-
tunately, when it comes to driving, mistakes can have huge consequences.
Crash rates are the highest when you first get your license, and the rate
doesn’t change much over the first year of driving. This is true regardless of
your age, but the younger the driver, the higher the crash rate. There is a
reason that car insurance rates drop for “kids” at age 25: it really takes that
long for them to become fully mature, experienced, functioning drivers. Seri-
ously, it takes about six years for the risk for young drivers to drop to the low
crash rates of experienced adults! If your kids don’t need to learn to drive
right away at age 16, talk with them about possibly waiting until they are 17
or 18. If they are not excited about getting a license right away, it’s not only
okay; it is great! And, chances are, they won’t be alone, as there is increasing
evidence to suggest that more teens are waiting until they are 18 or older to
get a driver’s license.
I have to say that two of my most harrowing parental experiences were (1)
training my two kids to drive and (2) letting them go once they were licensed.
Of course, one might argue that I was anxious because of what I’ve seen in
my profession; after all, I spend all day reading about crashes and such. This
may be true, but it’s also true that only by doing this work did I become fully
aware of the risks my kids would face on the road. Fortunately, this is all
behind me now. Congratulations! The fact that you are reading this probably
means that you will be in the same boat as I was then! Feel free to call your
friends with kids at 2:00 a.m. on prom night; they will be up to console you.
Advice abounds about the “correct” way to teach teens to drive, from the
old-fashioned way of riding around with parents for a while to attending very
expensive driving and racing schools. Frankly, the results of these schools
of thought are pretty mixed. Assuming that the teen spends enough time
behind the wheel, all of these methods generally teach teen drivers the fun-
damentals of how to control a car and interact with traffic. The driver’s test

requirement ensures teens can drive at a basic level and understand the
rules of the road, for the most part. However, as I’ve now said many times,
the problem is usually not that teen drivers lack knowledge; ultimately, it is
their choosing not to drive safely that is the biggest safety issue.
I will end this chapter with a few specific tips for effectively training your
teens to drive, but before that, I want to offer some more general advice.
What? You Want Me to Sign a Contract?

A fundamental question every parent or guardian needs to answer is, Do you
believe driving is a right or a privilege? If you’re a teen about to start driving, I
know what you’re going to say. However, your parents will probably disagree
with you. After all, they likely bought the car, pay for the insurance, and are
taking a chance that you will keep it together in a dangerous endeavor. Like
it or not, this entitles them to set the rules of the house.
When I was 15 and living in Rochester, Minnesota, my home was a couple of

miles from the local drive-in theater. That summer my parents allowed me to
take the family car to go to the movies with my friends. It was “buck night,”
which meant that it cost one dollar for a carload to get into the drive-in.
What do you think we did? Of course, we piled a dozen kids into my mother’s
Mercury Monterey—in both the passenger compartment and the trunk—and
cruised over to the movies. Sometimes, friends managed to get some beers.
But wait, there’s more. Believe it or not, I didn’t have a driver’s license or
even a permit at the time. While my parents (mainly my father) had good
intentions by loaning me the family vehicle, this was a recipe for disaster:
an overloaded car, no seat belts, underage kids, lots of testosterone, and
novice alcohol use. I suppose my dad’s logic was that the drive-in was so
close to home that nothing truly bad could happen during such a short trip
on a lightly traveled rural road. My father was, of course, assuming that we
wouldn’t drive somewhere else. We made it safely to and from the movies,
but my parents were much too trusting in this situation. Our risk level was
significantly increased. My point is if you want to help ensure the safety of
your teen driver, then you have to set more conservative house rules.
One approach that many parents are taking these days when training their
teen drivers is to enter into a contract with them. A contract sets forth the

rules and the consequences of violating those rules, and it is imperative that
both parties agree to the terms.
Some teen driving contracts employ the concept of “checkpoints.” Check-

points enable young drivers to earn additional independence when certain
milestones are reached in good standing. This is based on a concept called
“graduated driver’s licensing,” or GDL. All states have their own GDL laws
with respect to newly permitted and licensed drivers. The most accurate
statements I can make about these GDL rules are that the stronger rules save
a lot of lives and the rules of each state are all over the map (pun intended).
Our friends at the IIHS have developed a handy tool that shows the GDL laws
by state and how your teen’s crash risk would be lowered if you (or your state)
enacted more stringent GDL rules. Research has shown that an ideal set of
GDL rules includes the following:
1. Issuing a driver’s permit on the teen’s 16th birthday

2. Receiving 70 hours of supervised driving practice
3. Issuing the driver’s license on the teen’s 17th birthday
4. Prohibiting unsupervised nighttime driving after 8:00 p.m.
5. Banning teen passengers in the car without supervision until the teen
driver is 18
According to the Centers for Disease Control, implementation of GDL pro-

grams for 16-year-old drivers could reduce their fatal crash rate by more than
40 percent; their overall crash rate would be reduced by nearly 25 percent.
If all states were to adopt GDL programs, South Dakota would receive the
greatest benefit of implementing all of the rules, with a 63 percent reduction
in fatal crashes.
Overall, the use of checkpoints has proven to be beneficial. The goal is to

keep teen drivers safe and alive. I raised two teens, and I know that telling
your kids they can’t drive unless they follow these rules is never a pleasant
conversation, particularly if their friends don’t have to follow the same rules.
While certain aspects of the ideal rules may be difficult or even impracti-
cal for many families to implement, at least consider enacting them to some
degree. The aforementioned IIHS calculator lets you input different levels
of different rules to gauge your teen’s crash risk, such as no nighttime dri-
ving after 10:00 p.m. instead of 8:00 p.m. or having one teen passenger pre-

sent instead of none. I strongly recommend that you work out a set of rules
that keeps your teen as safe as possible while being (mostly) agreeable to all
involved. Be strong, and know that your teen will love you again when he or
she is 25!
Teens and Alcohol

It’s true that the US has an issue with drinking and driving at all ages, but
here are some startling statistics about driving and alcohol use in the 16 to 20
age group. Remember, this is the age when there is zero tolerance for alcohol
while driving a car.
• About 90 percent of college freshmen in the US drink alcohol even

though they are (almost) all breaking the law.
• Around 15 percent of 16- to 20-year-old drivers involved in a fatal crash
had a BAC above the adult legal limit of 0.08 percent.
• About one-half of all fatalities and serious injuries due to alcohol-
related crashes happen to passengers, so not riding with an intoxicated
driver is just as important as not driving while intoxicated.
To put these statistics into perspective, a few years ago we at VTTI

exchanged research on teen driving with some colleagues from Germany. As
it so happens, the young driver fatality rate is much lower in Germany than
it is in the US, largely thanks to the minimum driving age (18). However, what
particularly fascinated us was that our German colleagues felt strongly that
we had the alcohol-driving correlation backwards. Their opinion was that
since the drinking age in Germany is 16 and the driving age is 18, German
teens have two years to get used to the effects of alcohol and two years for
the novelty of drinking alcohol to wear off before they are able to get behind
the wheel.
There may very well be an element of truth in what our German friends were
telling us, but there are other safety factors at play. For example, if you are
pulled over by police at a traffic stop in Germany (or in a number of other
countries), you are required to breathe into the tube to check your BAC or
you lose your license for a very long time. If you breathe into the tube and
are over the legal BAC limit (0.05 percent in Germany), you also lose your
license for a very long time–no muss, no fuss, done deal. This may go a long

way toward explaining why people of all ages drink and drive less in Ger-
many, and in many other countries, than they do in the United States.
The lesson to draw from this is that you should never assume your teens
won’t drink and drive or their friends won’t be driving them around after
drinking, even at age 16. With this in mind, I have a piece of advice that is
purely a personal opinion, and I know it won’t sit well with everybody. When
my kids were learning to drive, I had to face the possibility that they would
find themselves, at one time or another, in a situation involving drinking and
driving that left them with few good options. So, I also told my kids—and their
friends—that if they needed a ride, at any time of the day or night, for what-
ever reason, I would pick them up. No questions asked and no punishment
of any kind (unless you count my long, arduous lecturing as punishment). All
they had to do was call and ask. While my kids were between 16 and 22 years
of age, I probably received 10 such calls from them and one or two from their
friends. It was well worth the sleep I lost.
Both my kids have continued to take drinking and driving very seriously.
They both have pocket Breathalyzers. My daughter has a BAC calculator app
on her smartphone. A few years ago, they came to visit and were downtown
with several of their friends. They all decided to celebrate a bit and take the
local van-ride service that generally charges $5 per person. This night, how-
ever, the driver wanted $150 for four of them (“Holidays, freezing rain, bars
closed, I can charge what I want”… shame on you!). Anyway, I got “the call”
and was very happy to get it. I was tired, it was late and cold out, but it was
so much better to get that call than the other call all parents or guardians
dread.
Teens and Sleep

Studies have shown that 16- to 18-year-olds need about 8 to 10 hours of sleep
each night. Due to circadian rhythm effects, the ideal time for teens to awake
is around 8:00 a.m. Of course, for a variety of reasons, teens have to get up
earlier to make it to school in many places. Therefore, many teens don’t get
enough sleep. Why am I telling you this? A 2017 study from the University of
Minnesota showed that a later start time at school reduced teen crashes by
about 70 percent.

Do what you can to make sure your teens are getting a reasonable amount
of sleep, especially if they have a long drive to school or work or have a long
trip on the horizon.
Trust but Verify

Some of you may remember the old Cold War saying “Trust but Verify,” which
is why we had treaties enacted while satellites watched our potential ene-
mies. This approach can also be used in teen driving. Essentially, you are in
a “Cold War” with your kids, even with a treaty in place, such as the driving
contracts described earlier. Even if your teens have gained your trust after
a lifetime of teaching them what’s right and what’s wrong, it is still impor-
tant to get verification. One method of verification is to form somewhat of a
coalition with other parents. We were lucky we lived in a pretty small town
with one medium-sized high school. This sometimes resulted in a call or
comment from another parent. In other words, there were many sets of eyes
in the community. Remember, trust but verify.
Technology is now available that allows parents or guardians to monitor their

teens with sensors and even video while the teens drive. In fact, there are
many driver monitoring systems on the market today. Some are very sim-
ple and measure speed, hard braking, and swerving, while others are quite
sophisticated and have cameras. VTTI has developed a research-based mon-
itoring system that is probably the most sophisticated but is currently too
expensive to sell. However, I will describe all of its features so that you can
get the full picture should you choose (wisely) to go shopping online for an
available monitoring system.
The VTTI system, called Driver Coach, is designed to detect all of the riskiest
teen driving behaviors, including seat belt use, speeding, swerving, hard
braking, fast accelerations, distraction, and fatigue. The detection of alcohol
presence will be a future capability of the system. My friend, colleague, and
former student Charlie Klauer and I conceptualized an initial study using this
system; Andy Petersen and his hardware folks at VTTI built the systems. This
system only records video and sensor data when a certain threshold mea-
sure has been detected, such as the car traveling faster than 15 mph above
the speed limit. If such a threshold is crossed, the system is triggered to
record 12 seconds of video and sensor data that are then transmitted to a

data reduction center at VTTI. The parents, guardians, and teen participating
in the study then receive a report card every week with video clips and the
driving behaviors of interest. In essence, the system allows you to watch your
teen drive, similarly to when you are riding along with the teen. As I have
stated before, I have raised two teens and fully understand how excited your
kids are going to be about having a system like this in their car. And I fully
understand that such systems will mysteriously get broken or stolen from
time to time. However, two aspects of these systems may make this option
more palatable:
1. The VTTI system, and some other driver monitoring systems, only
record data when a threshold value is exceeded. That is, if your teen
drives responsibly (no alcohol, no speeding, wearing a seat belt, no
aggressive driving, no texting), you will never see anything about his or
her driving.
2. VTTI recently installed test systems in the cars of newly permitted dri-
vers. In Virginia this means that teen participants will have these sys-
tems in their cars for nine months before they start driving
independently. The hope here is that these teen drivers will learn to
drive such that the system never collects data, making it agreeable for
the teens while teaching them to avoid the highest-risk driving situa-
tions.
I recommend that you think seriously about purchasing a driver monitoring

system for your teens. If you search the internet for “teen driver monitoring
systems,” you will see a wide range available. Video is probably very helpful,
but those systems are more expensive. Some insurance companies have dri-
ver monitoring programs that are fairly low cost. For Driver Coach, VTTI is
experimenting with the “calculator model,” in which the systems are loaned
out for a year from the high school and then returned and reused. In this
case the family would only have to pay a small monthly fee (maybe $9.99) for
the service. Although not free, this option is cheaper than receiving just one
speeding ticket during a year!
A critical point to make here is that if you choose to buy a driver monitoring
system, you have to actively participate in the entire program. Parents or
guardians will reduce their teen’s risk if they look at the data provided each
week and actively give feedback to their teens. Parents or guardians who do

not actively look at data and do not provide feedback will not see much, if
any, risk reduction.
Tips for Training Your Teens to Drive

Now, let me conclude with some specific advice for all of you parents and
guardians out there who are facing the grim reality of your teens coming of
age and getting behind the wheel.
1. Emphasize that you expect safe, attentive, low-risk driving. It is your

responsibility to teach your teens vehicle-management skills like steer-
ing, braking, and obeying the rules of the road. Most importantly, you
should emphasize no speeding, no distractions, no alcohol, and no
aggressive driving.
2. Teach them to see, not just look. My experiences with both of my kids
taught me that they would dutifully pull up to a stop sign, look twice
both ways, and sometimes pull out in front of a car anyway. Teens don’t
always fully grasp the concept of sight distance. Not only do they need
to be able to see, they need to be able to see far enough, even if they
have to creep ahead at the intersection, wait a while to pass a bicycle,
or look farther around the curve. In general, you should teach your
teens to look as far down the road as they reasonably can and to antici-
pate what is occurring ahead, in addition to simply keeping the car in
the lane. There is nothing handier than seeing the brake lights of a
vehicle two cars ahead or the slow-moving truck while you can com-
fortably change lanes to pass.
3. Drive around, a lot. Studies show that the more supervised driving
hours teens receive, the better off they are when they become inde-
pendent drivers. Even though you may be like me—45 hours of driving
with my kids seemed like 450—do as much supervised driving with your
teen as you can.
4. Give them the broadest range of driving experiences that you can—and
don’t be afraid to put them in unusual situations. Frankly, teens (and any
new drivers for that matter) just aren’t very good at dealing with the
unexpected. So, when it snows, take your teen to the empty shopping
center and have them spin out and correct the vehicle. If it’s icy, make
them practice going slow and steering and stopping in full control; also

make them stop while going downhill (at a safe location so you’re not
endangering other drivers while practicing). Have your teen drive in the
fog and point out that they can’t see far enough ahead to stop. Take
them as a passenger to a pedestrian area on a Saturday night (college
towns are good for this scenario) and let them watch the kids pop out
from between cars. Let them drive (for a while; watch for drowsiness
symptoms!) on a long trip so they understand what it’s like to get tired
while driving.
5. Forget racing school. Performance racing-type schools are now com-
monplace, and they all claim great benefits when it comes to teaching
driving skills. These schools can teach a higher level of driving skills
while making teens more confident in their driving abilities. However,
this can also be problematic: regardless of the skills acquired, an over-
confident teen driver is a dangerous thing behind the wheel of a car.
There’s also the fact that these programs are expensive, so if your kids
are really determined, they can pay for it themselves when they’re
adults.
6. Be calm, patient, and constructive. I know you’ve heard this before, but
staying calm and patient was the hardest part for me when teaching my
kids to drive. Let’s face it: it’s difficult to remain calm when your kid is
about to hit something. But here’s the thing. VTTI and the NIH con-
ducted a teen practice driving study involving 90 teen drivers and 131
parents. The study collected data during the entire practice driving
period and up to one year following licensure. One important finding
was that teen driver errors decreased over time, likely due to improved
practice time and parent instruction. Moreover, crash rates during
supervised practice driving were low, with no severe crashes occurring.
On a side note, the study found that teen driver engagement in sec-
ondary tasks increased during supervised driving, suggesting that there
is room for improvement in the ways teens receive supervised instruc-
tion.

9. Senior Drivers
Rage Against the Dying of the Light
My wife Melissa and I have had two parents who lived long enough that they
had to give up driving. My father did so after a series of strokes, while for
Melissa’s mother the cause was poor eyesight caused by macular degenera-
tion.
I was fortunate to be able to help my father after his strokes because he lived
in an assisted living facility close to my house. At that stage he had lost his
mobility to the point that he couldn’t walk without assistance. The damage
caused by his strokes was such that his vision and balance were impaired.
Even then, losing his independence was very hard for him. I recall one time
when I took him to the local grocery store to do some weekly shopping. As
I often did, I parked by the curb at the store, helped him into a motorized
shopping cart, and then went to park the car while he waited. Normally, I
would then accompany him into the store, helping him get around and find
what he needed. This time, however, my father decided to exercise his inde-
pendence.
As I was parking the car, I saw him look around, and with a wry smile on his
face, he took off on his cart and into the store without me. I was worried
that I might find him under a pile of soup cans or plowing through an aisle
filled with fellow shoppers. After I parked and ran into the store, I found him
cruising around in the wine aisle putting bottles in his basket. The bad news
for him was that he could no longer drink because of his medications. But he
was a good sport as I put the wine bottles back and we continued to shop. I
tried to point out the risks involved in what he had done. In the end, though,
I couldn’t really scold my father, and we had a good laugh about it.
It is very hard to give up one’s mobility. In essence, the person is losing some
degree of independence, even with the growing availability of public tran-
sit, rides from family and friends, and the resources to call a cab, Uber, or
Lyft when needed. That person can’t just hop in his or her own car and go
whenever, and wherever, they choose. With this in mind, my mother-in-law,
Nancy, told me that no seniors would read this book because it would just tell
| 105
them they can’t drive. I took her comment to heart and decided to approach
the subject from a different angle. Specifically, in this chapter I focus on two
points:
1. Why older drivers are safer than you think.

2. How we can all maintain our mobility as we grow older.
At VTTI we performed a study several years ago that required younger and
older drivers to react to an imminent crash event. We found that, unsur-
prisingly, the younger drivers had faster reaction times to hitting the brakes.
However, the older drivers were able to stop in a slightly shorter distance.
You may ask, How is that possible? Well, the younger drivers were quick to
get a foot on the brake, but then they hesitated for a brief moment while they
decided the best course of action, such as steering instead of, or in addition
to, braking. Even though it took them longer to get to the brakes, older dri-
vers hit those brakes hard and without hesitation. Whether this was because
of experience or because they knew on some level they needed to compen-
sate or adapt, the older drivers were more effective at making an emergency
stop.
From societal and public safety perspectives, there’s not an older-driver

problem. Seniors (aged 74 plus) are consistently at the lowest crash risk of all
driving-age groups on a per licensed driver basis. One reason for this low-
ered risk is that older drivers generally adapt very well for a very long time
despite growing limitations in vision, cognition, motor skills, reaction time,
and physical flexibility.
You may have noticed the term per licensed driver in the previous paragraph.
Older drivers tend to drive substantially fewer miles than younger age
groups do. When you look at the individual skill levels of older drivers, it’s
more instructive to look at the crash rate per mile driven. In that case we see
what is known as the “bathtub” curve, with seniors mirroring the high crash
rates seen among the youngest and least experienced drivers.
Interestingly, some in my field believe that the higher crash rate per mile
traveled for seniors owes largely to the seniors who travel very few miles.
Some scholars conjecture that in those few miles senior drivers may travel
more hazardous roads or experience more elevated levels of impairment and
risk. Of course, at some point drivers who live long enough can no longer

adapt. It may be that the older drivers who crash the most can simply no
longer compensate by driving on slower and safer roads, in limited traffic, in
good weather, in daylight, etc.
On a per licensed driver basis, older drivers have a lower crash risk than other age
groups because they tend to adapt well to driving conditions. VTTI conducts studies to
help understand the unique risks facing older drivers.
Another point to consider in this discussion is how we as human beings

age, both individually and as a population. As we get older, we become more
physically fragile, which means the risk of sustaining a serious injury or a
fatality is far greater per crash among older drivers compared to younger
drivers. Therefore, we need to prevent crashes by using a variety of counter-
measures, including making vehicles that aren’t just crashworthy but crash-
worthy in a way that specifically helps aging drivers and their passengers.
We are an aging society, and such aging of society is projected to continue

well into the middle of this century. Whatever issues we see on the road
today will be even greater challenges tomorrow. Additionally, those of us of
the baby boomer generation, who are creating this “gray tsunami,” will likely
be fundamentally different from our parents and grandparents regarding a
wide variety of factors that may impact driving safety. Those factors may
Senior Drivers | 107

include general health and vigor, driving patterns, living conditions, level and
desire for activity, and acceptance of technology, among others.
These changes pose certain challenges with respect to mobility. How do we

keep us all mobile? My friend and colleague Jon Antin directs the Center for
Vulnerable Road User Safety at VTTI. This center studies younger and older
drivers, as well as those who are largely unprotected in the transportation
community, such as pedestrians and bicyclists. I asked Jon to help me iden-
tify some of the ways we can address the unique needs of older, or more
mature, drivers. Here is what we came up with:
1. Building connected/automated vehicles. I will discuss this new genera-

tion of vehicle technology in chapters 11 and 12, but for now let me just
say that these evolving technologies have the potential to significantly
help older drivers who can no longer operate vehicles safely on their
own. Of course, these systems must be well-designed with older drivers
in mind.
2. Creating more “livable communities” and more well-designed shared
roadway spaces. By livable I mean communities that emphasize safe and
affordable transportation options. Some of this is already under way,
such as the efforts to make roads more accommodating to bicyclists
and pedestrians. However, we also need to think more about seniors on
the road (as both drivers and pedestrians) and incorporate their needs
into these efforts.
3. Training the brain. We have evidence suggesting that brain exercises
can benefit senior drivers. For example, the Advanced Cognitive Train-
ing for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) trial found brain exer-
cise programs to be effective in improving the cognitive performance of
older persons. The results were inconclusive, however, as to which
exercises offer the most benefit.
4. Improving the useful field of view through practice and exercise. In dri-
ving, useful field of view is the degree to which you can process relevant
information seen in your peripheral vision. Unfortunately, your useful
field of view declines with age, and this negatively impacts your driving
ability. Measuring the field of view that you can practically use has been
the most successful way to predict any meaningful outcomes in real-
world driving safety. The good news is that we have evidence suggest-
ing you can improve your useful field of view functionality through

practice and exercise. This may in turn reduce your crash risk and allow
you to be mobile longer.
Thus far, you’ll notice that I have avoided raising the question of when to quit
driving. I’ve done this for a few reasons. First, there is no formula for deter-
mining when someone should stop driving; functional age varies greatly from
person to person. Some people in their 90s can drive more safely than other
people who are in their 70s. Second, there is a vast amount of information
out there to help older drivers gauge their driving ability. For instance, both
the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and American Automo-
bile Association (AAA) have excellent websites to assist senior drivers. (See
References at the end of this book for more information.) Of course, this
means that the senior driver needs to be able to use the internet or enlist
someone who can. Third, I want Nancy and other senior drivers to read this
book because they will find in it useful advice and resources that will make
it possible for them to drive safely and thereby extend the time they are able
to stay behind the wheel.
Senior Drivers | 109

10. Motorcycles and a Few Tips
for Those Who Ride Them
When I was a junior in high school in Rochester, Minnesota, my father was
transferred to Atlanta, Georgia. We had some debate about whether I would
come with the family or just stay behind so that I could finish high school in
Rochester. I had a girlfriend, friends, etc., and wasn’t too excited about start-
ing over in a new school. In the end I moved to Georgia with them. The con-
ditions my father and I agreed upon were that he would give me $1,000 and
his motorcycle at the end of the school year and that I could travel anywhere
I wanted all summer long. I rode 4,000 miles that summer and spent less
time in Minnesota than you might think, because by that time my girlfriend
had left me for one of my best friends (sigh). I was 17 at the time and, oddly
enough, the thought of riding 4,000 miles on a motorcycle wasn’t nearly as
crazy sounding as it is today. A lot of my friends had bikes, and we often
commuted on bikes to save gas and have fun. A few years of racing dirt bikes
made me a pretty safe rider because I always assumed that hitting the pave-
ment would lead to my own death, which was a pretty good assumption.
Riding a sports bike, like this Kawasaki Ninja, significantly increases your crash risk.

As a motorcyclist, I’ve had some close calls on the road that taught me a lot
about principles such as conspicuity, but I never had a crash. Having just
wrote this, I must confess that I would never, never, never let my kids do
what I did. Why? The answer is simple: motorcyclists have the highest risk of
a fatal crash among all transportation users (cars, trucks, etc.):
• Per mile traveled, motorcyclists are about 30 times more likely to die
in a crash than those traveling in passenger cars.
• If you ride a sports bike (think leaning forward and going fast, such as
an Interceptor, Ninja, GSX-R, etc.), you are more than 100 times more
likely per mile traveled to die in a motorcycle crash than in a car
crash.
This is why some in the driving-safety business don’t call them motorcycles;
they call them donor-cycles. But hey, we’re all adults (or soon will be), and
motorcycles are fun. You can make your own decisions, and I might need a
kidney someday.
In all seriousness, though, I could write an entire book about how to control
and reduce risk on a motorcycle (which might happen if you all like this
book). One of the keys to success is experience—sheer time spent on the
bike. Of course, this assumes you can survive that long. Training probably
helps, particularly programs that are comprehensive and teach defensive
riding techniques (look up courses available near you on the Motorcycle
Safety Foundation website, listed under References at the end of this book).
However, the real biggies in terms of reducing risk are discussed below. To
help me with this section, I asked a VTTI motorcycle safety expert, Shane
McLaughlin, to weigh in with a few tips. Shane is a friend, former student,
and colleague who heads the VTTI Motorcycle Research Group.
Recognize How Bikes Are Different

Very few motorcyclists can brake as hard, or swerve as dramatically, as they
can in a car. Just assume for a moment that you are not one of those very
few. If you drive a motorcycle the same way you drive a car, you’re going to
get into trouble. After a crash in a car, the discussion is usually about vehicle
insurance, sometimes health insurance. With a similar crash on a motorcy-
cle, the ensuing discussion is more likely to be about disability or life insur-
Motorcycles and a Few Tips for Those Who Ride Them | 111
ance. On a motorcycle, you have to avoid the crash altogether through a
series of protective measures.
Know Your Riding Proficiency

Twenty-seven percent of riders involved in fatal crashes do not have a valid
motorcycle license. Some of these riders have had their licenses revoked,
but others just never bothered to get licensed in the first place. This
undoubtedly means that these riders are less proficient in general than those
who took the time to learn. Even if you have trained (highly recommended)
and have a proper license, each time you get on your motorcycle, think about
how long it has been since you last rode. Think about how rusty you are and
what might need some work or practice. Consider the extra tasks involved in
driving a motorcycle compared to driving a car. For example, if you are look-
ing for traffic as you approach an intersection while on a motorcycle, can
you do so while downshifting, balancing, reading signs and signals, and brak-
ing smoothly? If it has been a while since you’ve been on your bike, put in the
necessary practice (it makes perfect, after all). If you’re riding with friends,
pick ones who will accommodate the pace you need to maintain your safety.
Turns Will Get You
A major source of injuries and fatalities for motorcycle riders is going too fast while
taking a turn.

A major source of injuries and fatalities for motorcycle riders is going too
fast while taking a turn. Keep in mind that you are the only person who has
control of your vehicle, so it’s critical that you understand the road you are
on, read every sign, and maintain awareness of your speed at all times. Think
through the layers of protection you have on. Consider how you will man-
age potential hazards such as sharpness of a turn, gravel or ice in your lane,
and limited ability to anticipate oncoming vehicles beyond the curve. When
in doubt, always eliminate extra speed before starting to lean so that you are
able to avoid any of these hazards.
I Brake for Safety

It’s easy enough to gain speed, but how prepared will you be if you need to
stop suddenly? Braking can generally get you out of many common crash
scenarios. For example, if a line of cars stops in front of you, there’s a good
chance you will need to brake very hard. So, how good are you at stopping
your motorcycle? Part of this goes back to riding proficiency and knowing
your bike. You need to allow enough following distance based on your level of
riding ability. Arguing about the contribution of the front brake is like argu-
ing about breathing; it’s a given that it’s a necessity. If you aren’t using that
brake, you’re braking well below the capabilities of the bike.
They Don’t See You

We often assume when we drive our car through an intersection that other
drivers see us and will obey the traffic laws. More often than not, this is a
pretty good assumption to make. Even if you are wrong, you have a lot of
steel, plastic, airbags, and seat belts to protect you. None of this is true for
a motorcycle. Even though most motorcyclists believe their bikes are easy
to see, they are a lot less conspicuous than you might think due to a variety
of factors, including the size and profile of the bike, the color of the rider’s
clothing, and the overall visual contrast with the background environment.
I have two tips for motorcyclists on how to increase your chances of being
seen by other drivers:
1. Never assume that other drivers can see you. In fact, assume the oppo-
site—assume that they don’t see you and that they are about to pull out,
change lanes, or otherwise encroach on your space. Always be aware of
the closest threats in space and time, and look ahead to determine
where you can go if a driver encroaches on your path. In other words,
be vigilant, remain suspicious of other drivers, and have an out.
2. Do everything you can to increase your conspicuity. Burn your lights,
buy a brightly colored bike, add reflective tape to your bike, buy a kit
that flashes your lights, wear reflective clothing, wear light-colored
clothing, and buy a brightly colored helmet. You need to actively work
at being conspicuous.
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should, Part 2

If you are a football fan, at one time or another you’ve probably heard some-
one say that helmets should be banned from the game. Sound crazy? Not as
crazy, my friend, as 31 states getting rid of motorcycle helmet laws or requir-
ing only some riders (usually the younger ones) to wear a helmet. Are you
kidding me? If you are ever flying through the air at 60 mph, I’ll bet you wish
you had one. But hey, just because it is legal doesn’t mean that you have
to do it, so be a real rebel and wear a helmet—and not just a cereal bowl
with a strap on it; wear a real helmet. That way, fellas, your wife/girlfriend/
mother/significant other won’t have to clean up your drool and wipe your
ass (hopefully in that order) for the rest of your miserable life, assuming you
even survive a crash without a helmet.
And if that last part sounds sexist, it’s because 91 percent of motorcycle fatal-
ities are men; the majority of the other 9 percent are women passengers.
Remember what the most dangerous, mind-altering substance is for driving?
It’s doubly true for riding motorcycles: testosterone! Wearing a helmet
reduces your odds of dying in a crash by almost 40 percent. That means four
more helmeted riders would survive every 10 fatal crashes where no helmet
is present.
Natural Selection: Riding Under the Influence

According to our friends at the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, you are about

40 times more likely (odds = 40.0) to be in a fatal motorcycle crash if you
have consumed even a moderate amount of alcohol (BAC greater than 0.05
percent). A BAC of 0.05 percent is not very high. For me, a 185-pound man, it
takes only two beers in the first hour to achieve a BAC of 0.05 percent (and
only one beer per hour after that). Frankly, though, to ride safely I need to be
well below that limit—which means no more than one beer, period.
Just to emphasize this point: If I am riding a sports bike while sober, I am

already at 100 times greater risk of a crash than if I were behind the wheel of
an automobile. That risk increases by 40 times if I drink a couple of beers. In
big round numbers (keeping in mind that calculating your risk is not as sim-
ple as exact multiplication), per mile traveled, you are roughly 4,000 times
more likely to die in a crash on your sports bike after a couple of drinks
compared to driving a car while sober. Hence the title of this section: riding
drunk, particularly on a motorcycle, is just a matter of natural selection.
Are You Really Having a Midlife Crisis?

During the past decade a scary statistic has emerged: fatalities among riders
aged 40 and older have increased by 12 percent. In 2016 more than one-half
of fatal motorcycle crashes involved riders over the age of 40. The older
rider group is made up of several different kinds of cats: those who have been
riding for a long time, those who are new to riding, and those who used to
ride but haven’t for a long time. It appears that a lot of these fatal crashes
of older riders, or at least the reason for the growth in the fatality rate, fall
within the third group, those who haven’t been on a ride for a long time but
have started riding again. There are probably several factors at play here,
including rusty skills, overconfidence, the purchase of a more powerful or
bigger bike, and age-related performance degradation. The key here is to
ease back into riding. It is important to retrain, consider yourself a novice,
and take things slower than you used to … at least until you’ve redeveloped
your skill level.
Group Riding: Are You the Weakest Link?

If you prefer to ride in a group, you need to keep in mind that there is an
increased risk factor at play here relative to the skill level of the least expe-
rienced rider in the group. More experienced riders may have the skills nec-
essary to ride faster, take curves faster, stop faster, etc. However, the least
experienced riders in the group may be pushing beyond their skill levels to
keep up with the group. If you are an experienced rider, be cognizant of var-
ious skill levels in your group and don’t put your less-experienced buddy in a
bad situation. If you are the more inexperienced rider, recognize that other
riders may make it look easy. Don’t let the moment you run off the road be
the time you realize you’re not as strong of a rider. Ride within your comfort
level; you can catch up a little later.
When riding in a group, keep in mind the difference in skill level among the riders. The
least experienced riders may be pushing beyond their skill levels to keep up with the
group.
A Special Case of Speed Kills

When I lived in Colorado, I had a four-cylinder Honda 750 (“750 four”). Each
year, some friends and I would get together and take a bike trip around the
mountains. This, of course, was a lot of fun. During one of these trips, we
pulled off at a rest stop to hang out for a bit. After our stop, we were feel-
ing our oats a bit. As we merged back onto the nearly empty interstate, we

decided to accelerate to well over 100 mph, something that wasn’t hard to do
with the bikes we were riding.
As we came over a rise, we saw a state police officer sitting on an overpass.

A short time later, we were all pulled over on the side of the road, convinced
that we were going to jail. The penalty for going 50 mph or more over the
speed limit varies by state, but it is always expensive and never pretty. The
officer came up and asked, “Do you know the speed limit?” I said, “Yes, sir,
it’s 55.” He said, “Well, I got you going 70 and your friend here going 75 …”
We all breathed a huge sigh of relief because we knew he was guessing and
didn’t get us on radar. But then he said, “Boys, this is your lucky day. I own a
Honda CBX 1050 [a six-cylinder bike], and I am sure that you were surprised
that you were speeding. So, I am just going to give you a warning this time
… but I will radio ahead, and we will all be keeping an eye on you.” The funny
thing was that we thought he was just trying to scare us, only to see state
patrol cars flash their lights at us twice more that day. It was a good thing we
were minding the speed limit. A lucky day indeed.
The message I’m trying to get across here is that motorcycles can be
wickedly fast—and our bikes of the past weren’t even close to what you can
buy today. As a point of comparison, the fastest production car right now,
the Bugatti Veyron, can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. That’s damned
fast, but not as fast as several motorcycles on the road. As many as seven
gas-powered production motorcycles are faster. I say gas powered because,
a few years ago, we ran across a new company that makes electric motorcy-
cles called Lightning. A Lightning goes from 0 to 60 mph in 1.5 seconds and
has a top speed of 218 mph. (They recommend that you buy it with the fairing
or windscreen option if you plan to ride over 180 mph.) There is no produc-
tion four-wheeled vehicle that can do this. It takes very, very little time to
get into trouble on a bike.
Near my house in southwest Virginia, we typically see kids from the nearby
college ride along our curvy (meaning fun for them) road on their sports
bikes during the spring. When my kids were young and playing near the road,
these kids on their sports bikes zoomed by at speeds in the triple digits. It
made me want an offensive weapon every now and again. Not only does the
road feature sharp curves, but it has suburban neighborhoods, hidden dri-
veways, short sight distances, and slow traffic. As a result, every year one or
two sports bike riders on that road end up disabled or dead.
As you might expect, speeding on a bike is a factor in a large percentage of

fatal crashes: 33 percent of motorcycle fatalities involve speeding, compared
to 20 percent for cars and 8 percent for heavy trucks. Stay at a reasonable
speed, no matter how tempting it is to let ’er fly.

11. The Future of Transportation,
Part I
Active Safety Systems and Connected Vehicles
We have all seen imaginative depictions of what driving will be like in the
future. Just think of the flying cars in The Jetsons and Back to the Future, or
have a look at the 1956 Central Power and Light Company advertisement,
shown below, with a car driving itself while a family plays games under a
clear glass dome.
A 1950s vision of the car of the future. The Central Power and Light Company placed
this advertisement in leading US newspapers and magazines, including the Saturday
Evening Post.
These depictions always have their allure. They imagine a time when traffic
jams are a thing of the past and we can be productive or entertained while
we commute. And hey, if we can just get rid of all the human drivers, we will
all be safe, right? You may be surprised by my answer. But first, I want to talk
a bit about the progression of new vehicle technologies.
| 119
Active Safety Systems
The cars of today are amazing feats of engineering. Take, for instance, the
recent development of active safety systems. We’ve had passive safety sys-
tems in our automobiles for a long time—seat belts, airbags, crumple zones,
etc.—and they are good at increasing your chances of surviving a crash.
Active safety systems, on the other hand, help you avoid a crash.
In 1991 I helped conduct the first on-road evaluation of an active safety sys-
tem concept known as forward collision warning (FCW). One of my students
at the time was Dan McGehee, now at the University of Iowa, and together
Dan and I instrumented a prototype Cadillac with a $15,000 scanning laser
from a jet fighter; this laser served as the warning sensor. (Today, automotive
radars sell for just a few hundred dollars and are much more capable.)
The study was conducted on-road with a participant who was a novice to
the scenario. This person was put behind the wheel of the Cadillac and told
to follow another car in front. The driver was told that the lead car was also
testing a “variety of advanced technologies,” but in reality it was just leading
the route and braking at different levels and speeds so we could see how our
participant driver reacted. Afterwards we published an award-winning paper
(kind of a big deal for academics) in which we pointed to the benefits of this
type of active system while providing much-needed information on proper
following distance and brake reaction time.
My friend and colleague Rich Deering spent many years at General Motors
(GM) doing safety research and design work for safety systems, including the
early work on active safety systems. Suppliers and inventors would talk to
Rich on a regular basis, trying to sell their active safety ideas to a very large
vehicle manufacturer and get wealthy in the process by selling hundreds of
thousands of units. Rich used to say on a pretty regular basis that he had a
good week because he knew how to solve more than 100 percent of the crash
problem. You might wonder how this could be true. Well, it wasn’t. But the
claims of the inventors and suppliers (“This will reduce rear-end crashes by
50 percent,” or “That will reduce run-off-road crashes by 70 percent”) added
up to more than was even possible. The lesson here, which I will discuss in
detail later, is to consider the source when you hear people making amazing
claims, especially those about new technology. Treat grand claims with sus-
picion, and consider the source they come from.

With this warning in mind, let me offer some friendly advice about how to
make the most of active safety systems.
Become One with Your Ride

Active safety systems are designed to reduce, and ideally eliminate, the risk
of crashing. They employ a variety of technologies to warn drivers of pend-
ing danger or to even prevent that danger. For instance, electronic stabil-
ity control (ESC) automatically controls the power, braking, and wheel slip of
each wheel independently. By performing these maneuvers at a high rate of
speed, the system can stabilize a car that is sliding or otherwise losing trac-
tion. Forward collision warning is another example of an active safety sys-
tem; it’s designed to prevent collision with an object in front of the car (say,
another vehicle, a wall, or an animal on the road). Some forward collision
warning systems simply alert drivers to the danger while others automati-
cally brake at the onset of a forward collision scenario. A variation on this is
automatic emergency braking (AEB), which provides a last-ditch automatic
full brake application if a driver fails to respond.
The results are still preliminary as to how effective active safety systems are
at reducing injurious crashes. However, our friends at the IIHS tell us the fol-
lowing:
1. Electronic stability control is very effective and reduces fatal crashes by

about one-half compared to non-equipped cars.
2. Forward collision warnings can cut rear-end crashes by as much as 23
percent, but the results vary by manufacturer. Systems that automati-
cally brake, rather than just warn the driver, seem to be more effective
(see point number 3).
3. Automatic emergency braking may reduce injury claims by up to 35
percent.
4. Lane departure warning systems may reduce injurious crashes by 21
percent, but once again, results vary by manufacturer.
5. Blind spot monitoring or detection can reduce the rate of injurious
lane-change crashes by 23 percent.
The Future of Transportation, Part I | 121

It’s still too early to produce hard stats, but early results suggest that the
effects of these active safety systems may increase when the systems com-
bine with each other. For example, adaptive cruise control appears to be
beneficial, especially when paired with forward collision warning and auto-
matic emergency braking. However, these systems must be well designed,
so look to resources like IIHS to learn about the effectiveness of particular
active safety systems.
Active safety systems are continually evolving and will no doubt improve
with each model year. However, one thing is certain regarding active safety
technology: you need to understand how the system works and what it is
telling you. In the past you might have been able to drive away from the deal-
ership in a new car without pausing to read the owner’s manual or learn
about the vehicle’s safety features. Newer technologies, however, require
that you take time to learn the active safety features before putting too many
miles on the car.
We all know that pretty much no one reads the owner’s manual of a vehicle,
but a number of studies have shown that safety systems can become inef-
fective or even detrimental if they aren’t used properly. This happens when
the driver has an incorrect mental model of how a system works. In fact, our
friends at AAA recently found that more than three-quarters of drivers were
unaware of the limitations of their active safety systems or had an incorrect
understanding of what the system detected and how it responded. Some,
for instance, thought their blind spot monitoring systems detected speed-
ing vehicles or vulnerable road users when in fact they did no such thing. If
you’re driving a vehicle equipped with ABS, the old standard of “pumping the
brakes” won’t be necessary.
My friend and colleague at VTTI Eddy Llaneras has conducted dozens of

studies of active safety systems. One of these studies focused on a system
available in new cars that alerts drivers to objects in their path as they back
up. In it he found that some drivers effectively ignored backup warnings (and
even automated brakes) as they were backing toward an obstacle behind
them. They would look around and, not seeing anything obstructing their
path, continue to back up into the object. The problem was that they weren’t
able to see small objects behind their vehicles. The system correctly
detected the obstacle and warned the driver, but the driver backed over the
object anyway, trusting their eyes over the warnings. The solution to this

problem was to suggest that a backup camera be integrated into the warning
system, a configuration that is now a common feature in many newer vehicle
models. This is certainly an improvement, but as is often the case with new
vehicle technologies, a rear-vision system is only effective if drivers actually
use the system—and use it properly.
VTTI regularly tests new vehicle technologies (left) for manufacturers, suppliers, and
government agencies on its Smart Roads in southwest Virginia (right).
Be Aware of Unintended Consequences

VTTI regularly tests new vehicle technologies for manufacturers and their
suppliers, even at times for government agencies. Vehicle safety systems go
through extensive testing during development, but our testing is designed
specifically to put these systems through the rigors of the real world. A big
part of what we are looking for are unintended consequences—unanticipated
results that arise when people use these systems in the real world.
As an example, a few years ago a truck manufacturer built a system that

alerted drivers when they were about to cross a lane line on the highway.
The manufacturer was marketing the system as a solution to the problem of
truckers falling asleep behind the wheel. The idea was that drivers would use
the system as a prompt to pull off the road and rest. However, the manufac-
turer found during the first field tests that drivers were using the system not
as a prompt to pull off the road but as an “alarm clock” to wake them when
they were tired and falling asleep. In other words, rather than thank their
lucky stars and pull over to get some rest, they saw it as a way to continue
driving so that they could clock more mileage than before.

In this case the unintended consequence was that drivers were relying on
the system to wake them up at the first sign of trouble when, in fact, the
manufacturer’s intent in designing the system was to prevent trucks from
crossing a lane line. The system did nothing to warn drivers of objects
ahead (it was never designed to do this), and occasionally the system would
“miss” an alert. This overreliance on the system could have actually increased
crashes rather than reduce them. Fortunately, the system was never
deployed in such a configuration.
I bring this up because, as a driver, you always need to be aware of your

own behavior behind the wheel and how that behavior affects your use of an
active safety system. It’s not enough to understand how a particular system
works. It’s important to use the system as it was intended to be used and not
rely on it to do something it was never designed to do.
The Next Big Thing: Cars That Talk to Each Other and
Everything Else
Modern cars are essentially rolling computers. Thanks to GPS, they often
know where they are, where they are going, and at what speed. Positions
measured by an automotive GPS are not terribly accurate, though, with
errors as great as 30 feet relative to the car’s absolute position on the
ground. However, if two cars were to travel close together and talk to the
same GPS satellites, their positions relative to one another would be pretty
accurate. Essentially, if you could make cars that “talk” to each other, they
could avoid hitting each other or at least send warnings about impending
collisions.
This concept is already a reality—it’s called connected-vehicle communica-

tion, and it enables vehicles to talk to each other, to the roadside, and to
devices such as smartphones. This type of communication uses dedicated
short-range radios (essentially a version of Wi-Fi), cellular communications,
or cellular communications that act like Wi-Fi. In the latter case, the signal
travels from one car directly to another car or a point along the highway
instead of through a cell tower. Connected-vehicle communications have
huge potential. While using it your car can instantly sense when the car in
front of you slams on its brakes. It can just as easily sense when the vehicle
five cars ahead of you slams on its brakes.

Connected-vehicle communications can also tell you when you are about to
change lanes and hit another car or when you should slow down due to haz-
ardous road conditions. With roadside radios and even radios embedded in
cell phones, connected-vehicle communications can tell you when you are
about to run a stoplight, when another car is about to run a stoplight, when
there is a motorcycle in your blind spot (more conspicuity!), or when you are
on a collision path with a bicycle, scooter, or pedestrian. The safety possibil-
ities when using connected-vehicle communications are vast. And perhaps
the best part is that you get all of these safety benefits for the cost of a rel-
atively inexpensive radio or cellular device, compared to the more expensive
radar, lidar (laser), sonar, and machine-vision (that is, camera-based) sen-
sors.
VTTI has been working with connected-vehicle technology for more than a
decade. Much of this work is done through our Center for Advanced Auto-
motive Research, which is directed by Zac Doerzaph. Zac and his group have
done a number of studies that show the potential of this technology. It’s esti-
mated by our friends at NHTSA that connected-vehicle technology has the
potential to eliminate about 70 percent of crashes involving alert drivers.
This is why NHTSA has been working with car companies and suppliers for a
long time in determining the next steps forward in connected-vehicle tech-
nology. In 2017 the agency issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking—essen-
tially, a public notice—to gather feedback about the possible implementation
of connected-vehicle technology in vehicles. To date, no mandate has been
issued by NHTSA, but it remains a top priority for the agency.

Part II
Automated Vehicles
I believe that in my lifetime—or at least in yours if you’re younger than I
am—we will see automation in vehicles advance to the point where cars will
more or less drive themselves. First, though, some concrete realities need to
be addressed in the deployment of these vehicles.
A Transportation Revolution?
Tom speaks about the future of transportation at a TEDx Salon talk in Wilmington,
Delaware, 2017
(Source: TedX Salon)
In 2017 I gave a TEDx Salon talk in Wilmington, Delaware, about this very
subject. One of my main points had to do with common perceptions of auto-
mated and autonomous vehicles. Most people think of them as a new devel-
opment in transportation or as a revolution that is about to transform our

vehicles and our roadways. This perception is not surprising, given what we
overwhelmingly hear in the media. In reality, these systems are not as new
as people think. The technology has been gradually developing over the past
few decades. Therefore, instead of talking about a transportation revolution,
we really should be thinking of it as an evolution.
To understand this evolution, it may first help to understand what I mean

when I use the terms automated and autonomous. The Society for Automo-
tive Engineers (SAE) International, which provides information about vehi-
cles and vehicular systems to the public, created a system to classify what
they dub “driving automation.” It created this system—or taxonomy—because
not all advanced vehicles have the same level of functionality. SAE frequently
updates these classifications (which in and of itself speaks to an evolution of
the technology). The most recent update came in 2018.
The SAE system of classification (SAE standard J3016_201806) divides driving

automation into six levels:
• Level 0—No driving automation. The driver performs all of the tasks of
driving, even when using active safety systems.
• Level 1—Driver assistance. The driver performs most of the driving
tasks, with limited automated system control of either the steering or
acceleration/braking tasks.
• Level 2—Partial driving automation. The driver is still responsible for
the overall driving task, with the automated system having limited con-
trol of both steering and acceleration/braking tasks; for a point of ref-
erence, this is generally the level at which the Tesla Autopilot performs.
• Level 3—Conditional driving automation. The automated system per-
forms some driving tasks, but the driver is the “fallback” system while
the automated system is engaged.
• Level 4—High driving automation. The driver is still present in the vehi-
cle, but the automated system performs the entire driving task; there is
no expectation for a user to respond to a request to intervene if the
automated system is engaged.
• Level 5—Full driving automation. The automated system fully operates
the vehicle while engaged and the driver is present in the vehicle; there
is no expectation for a user to respond to a request to intervene if the
automated system is engaged.
The Future of Transportation, Part II | 127

The Tesla Autopilot is one example of a Level 2 automated vehicle.
These are very simplistic explanations of the SAE levels of driving automa-
tion. If you look at the list, you can see why we differentiate between auto-
mated and autonomous driving. With automated driving, the driver still has
a role (Levels 1 and 2 and sometimes Levels 3 and 4). With autonomous dri-
ving, the driver has no role (Levels 3 and 4 sometimes, Level 5 all of the time).
If you want to get ultra-technical, the fact of the matter is that automated
and autonomous are not SAE-approved terms, but exact terminology doesn’t
really matter to most of us who have to drive (or ride) in these things. The
important point is that not all advanced vehicles are the same nor do they
require the same level of driver involvement.
Just as there are different levels of driving automation, there are also dif-
ferent applications for automation. Some automated vehicles are meant pri-
marily for individual drivers who use them for personal needs. Think of Tesla
as an example. Then there are rideshare and on-demand vehicle programs
that have various service-based revenue models not dependent on individ-
ual vehicle purchases. For example, Book by Cadillac and Maven Reserve let
drivers in larger US cities rent Cadillac or Chevy vehicles for a flat fee. These
on-demand vehicle programs have options with limited automated features

at this time, with the opportunity to feature more automation as such vehi-
cles become available.
Other automated vehicles that you may see soon are robotic taxis. It is likely
that these vehicles will initially be “last-mile” applications—applications that
help people travel the last leg to their final destination—as part of a larger
transit system along a single (sometimes dedicated) corridor and will grad-
ually grow to include more urban corridors and other types of commutes.
It’s difficult to predict how this part of the automation picture will unfold.
However, it’s safe to say that it will be many years before such services are
provided ubiquitously in both urban and rural areas (just think of the amount
of time, space, and bureaucratic red tape we would have to weed through to
build a dedicated corridor).
Another application of driving automation is truck platooning. The concept

behind truck platooning is increasing fleet efficiency, fuel economy, and
safety by grouping semitrucks together such that they travel in a “pack”
using connected-vehicle communications and automated lane keeping and
cruise control. In these platoons, only the lead truck would have an active
driver, while the remaining trucks would have either no driver or a driver
that could sleep or do other tasks. However, there are complexities to truck
platooning, such as the inevitable car that tries to cut in front of a group of
trucks because the car driver is trying to make an exit, pass someone, etc.
Our researchers at VTTI are currently studying these situations to determine
if there is an ideal distance between trucks that discourages car cut-ins.
Remember, trucks are bigger and have more mass than a car, so they can’t
brake—even automatically—as quickly as a passenger vehicle. One added
complexity is the fact that if the lead driver in a platoon fails to drive safely,
the result could be five 40-ton vehicles mowing into a line of stopped cars on
the interstate or going through the guardrail into a suburban neighborhood.
In other words, despite all of the advantages, these platooning systems need
to be close to perfect when they hit the road.
What’s It Really Like Being in an Automated Vehicle?

One of the more fun and interesting parts of what we do at VTTI is driving
the latest and greatest production (and sometimes prototype) cars when
they first come out. For instance, we have been able to drive a number of

cars with some level of automated control in the lateral (steering) and lon-
gitudinal (accelerating and braking) dimensions (think SAE Level 2 or Level 3
driving automation). At this time there are about six cars out there with these
features, although all are different in design. At this point, most of them are
designed primarily for open highway use and almost all of them expect you
to keep your hands on the steering wheel and pay attention as you would in
a car with no such features.
At VTTI we’ve conducted a number of studies designed to tell us what drivers

might actually do in these cars as opposed to what the manufacturer or
dealer tells them to do. Surprise! The two often don’t match. This is why
looking for unintended consequences is so important when we are evaluat-
ing new advanced-vehicle technology. Drivers don’t always use a system as
intended, so we need to know what happens in such instances. Better to find
out before the system is widely used than afterwards.
I was driving one of these new automated-vehicle models recently. In doing

so, I assumed the role of a driver who was inexperienced with the vehicle—a
driver who probably didn’t fully read and understand the owner’s manual
(about 90 percent of us are guilty of this) or didn’t pay attention to the dealer
when picking up a $120,000 car full of exciting features that the driver just
wanted to get out on the road (probably what at least 99 percent of us would
do).
I set the system on automated control on an interstate near my house and

proceeded to test its limits. I am a safety professional, so don’t try this at
home. I took my hands off the wheel and headed on a three-hour trip to one
of VTTI’s other testing facilities. The car did pretty well, reminding me occa-
sionally to put my hands back on the steering wheel, which I did for a sec-
ond or two before continuing hands-free. This model of car changes lanes
by itself when the turn signal is activated, so I was passing cars in pretty
heavy traffic. Then, it started to rain, which generated some splash and spray
from an adjacent semitruck. For some reason, the car decided to steer hard
left toward the guardrail. My hand was right near the wheel, so I was able to
recover control quickly. In another second, though, I would have had a dif-
ferent story to tell. Lesson learned. The automation system didn’t work well
in a low-visibility circumstance. This shortcoming is understandable, but it’s
a problem that requires a warning and subsequent transfer of control back
to manual driving.

As I continued on my trip, the weather cleared and traffic subsided, which
made me think, “Hey, now is a good time to use the system in conditions
where it should work well.” And it did work well … most of the time. During
my trip the car would have left the road probably two to three more times
had I not manually intervened to prevent it. Again, that’s fine as long as the
driver’s hands are on the wheel and he or she is paying attention. However,
the danger is that drivers will adapt to automated systems in such a way that
they rely on it too much, allowing themselves to take their eyes off the road
for too long. They might also become sleepy because they have nothing to
do or the scenery is boring—both of which are unintended consequences of
this technology.
Researchers in our VTTI Center for Automated Vehicle Systems recently

studied how drivers respond to Level 2 and Level 3 automated vehicles.
The results suggest that drivers of automated cars respond more slowly to
prompts the longer they are in the car. Some participants ignored alerts
while engaging in a secondary task, which tells us that some users are likely
to treat driving as the secondary task, a behavior that will have its own set of
unintended consequences.
To explain what I mean, I want to return to Gene Farber, who I mentioned

earlier in the book. Gene was a driving-safety engineer at Ford for many
years, and he influenced a lot of folks in our field, including me. The main
reason for his influence was that he was a principled pragmatist who valued
science that could be applied in whatever form to save lives, including in car
design, driver education, and coherent safety laws. But another reason is that
Gene was a great “BS detector”—something that is extremely valuable in our
business. Everyone knows how to solve the driving safety problem, but most
of the so-called solutions don’t work. Gene knew when someone was playing
the BS card. He also had a great sense of humor, which meant that he knew
how to call it out in entertaining ways.
One time Gene and I were listening to a presentation about an automated

vehicle in development that could drive itself under most conditions and
most of the time. The driver could essentially rely on the car to steer, main-
tain speed, and brake if needed. The driver’s sole task was to be alert and
watch in case something unusual happened, at which time the driver would
need to take control back from the vehicle. At the end of the talk, Gene

observed, in his own unique and acerbic way, “Are you crazy? The driver
won’t be ready to take control because they’ll be having sex in the back seat.”
Gene’s point was that humans are basically terrible at staying alert and
watching for something that rarely happens. It’s a lesson we learned (or
should have learned) many years ago from the nuclear power industry—think
of Three Mile Island. We will soon be seeing vehicles on the road in large
numbers with systems that have sensors to monitor the state of the driver.
These systems are amazing, but the danger is that we will become so depen-
dent on them that we will fail to be ready when something goes wrong, which
it inevitably will at one time or another.
The best way to be ready for such situations is to take time to understand
how these advanced systems work. Whenever you are driving a car that has
some type of new automated feature—like automated emergency braking or
lane keep assist—you need to know how the system works, when it works,
and when it doesn’t work. Therefore, it’s best to start out driving as though
the system doesn’t exist. The way these systems are currently being designed,
they are basically intended to be a backup if the driver fails—in other words,
if you fail. It’s very important you realize that you are still in charge and that
you must be ready at all times to be the beast of a crash-avoiding driver that
you are, which no automated system can readily replace. By driving this way,
the automated systems help you be safer by acting as a redundant safety
system—similar to my wife, who currently serves this purpose by faithfully
yelling at me whenever I do something wrong while driving. A redundant sys-
tem is effective because both the driver and system have to fail in order to
crash.
We’ve seen in VTTI studies how drivers may adapt to automated systems in
unsafe ways. My friend and colleague, Naomi Dunn, and I recently completed
a study for our friends at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. We found
that people behave differently with automation depending on several fac-
tors, namely: 1) how much they had used it and 2) whether the automated car
was theirs or borrowed. For new users, there was a “novelty” phase where
they “tested” the systems while they were learning. This involved purposely
ignoring the system if it asked the driver to take control, or otherwise deter-
mining the system’s limits—like testing automated braking by not braking to
see if the car would really brake by itself. This is not something we recom-
mend doing, for the obvious reason that if you test the system without really

knowing how it works, the test itself can get you into a crash! Instead, it is
better to be that completely redundant safety system that you are and learn
and follow all of the instructions and recommendations for advanced vehicle
systems.
Another phenomenon occurred in this same study, after drivers had driven
with the automated systems for a few months (the post-novelty phase). What
we saw here was that drivers started to trust the systems too much on occa-
sion, or they overly adapted to the additional automated capabilities (think
steering and braking) afforded by the systems. This adaptation included tak-
ing their eyes off the road for longer periods (remember the most impor-
tant point in this book relative to reducing your crash risk: keep your eyes on
the road!). This all supports the points made earlier about advanced-vehicle
technology: working with the technology in your car the way it was designed
to be used is critically important, and adapting by adopting bad behaviors
can always increase your risk, even with highly sophisticated systems.
Human Drivers Are Really, Really Good … for the Most

Part
As I’ve tried to show, automated cars and trucks are not perfect, and they
will not be perfect for some time. This will change someday, but the pace of
change will be slower than most people think. However, if you talk to some
advocates today, you might come away with the impression that automated-
vehicle technology is already perfect or near perfect. These advocates will
point out that more than 37,000 people die annually on US roadways, with
94 percent of those fatalities due to human error. Therefore, they argue that
deploying this technology immediately can do no more damage than human
drivers. There is some validity to this argument, but it’s also too simplis-
tic. For instance, it doesn’t account for contingencies such as what hap-
pens if fatalities occur at the fault of automated vehicles. Will people be as
willing to jump into these vehicles when they hear crash stories from their
friends or read about them on the internet? In such cases, it won’t matter
that the number of fatalities is actually much lower than the number caused
by human drivers.
It also must be said that human drivers aren’t that terrible. To return to my
friend Gene (the BS detector), he once developed a driving behavior model

that revealed that an average US driver will make approximately 3,000,000
successful braking maneuvers with one failure (a rear-end crash) during 25
years of driving. The drivers will successfully brake in all kinds of weather
and lighting conditions, in numerous odd and anomalous scenarios, despite
other drivers doing strange things around them.
Early in my career I worked at the University of Iowa with high-fidelity dri-

ving simulators. These simulators allowed us to create any number of traffic
scenarios, no matter how unlikely. In one case we were trying to determine
whether a radar-based forward crash avoidance system would be benefi-
cial in helping distracted drivers avoid crashes. So, we distracted the driver
and created a “reveal” scenario during which a simulated lead truck would
suddenly swerve out of the lane, revealing a stationary car in the driver’s
lane. Based on everything we knew about driver performance, such as reac-
tion time, we calculated that at least one-half of the drivers could not possi-
bly avoid the crash. After running 50 or more drivers through the scenario,
nobody crashed. They avoided hitting the stopped vehicle by a number of
methods, including swerving to the shoulder and not braking, slowing down
to let a vehicle pass in the adjacent lane and then swerving left, and just hit-
ting the brakes faster than expected.
Woman using a driving simulator that recreates the experience of driving under the
influence of alcohol. She is wearing glasses that distort her vision.

By contrast, our research at VTTI shows that drivers in automated cars can’t
be relied on to monitor and react like they can in manual driving. Even if
they’re not having sex in the back seat, drivers will read, write, and do many
other things while the car drives itself. My friend Eddy Llaneras and other
colleagues have shown that drivers take their eyes off the road for as much
as 30 seconds in even partially automated driving. To put that into perspec-
tive, it takes a little more than three seconds to travel the length of a football
field at highway speeds. Taking your eyes off the road for 30 seconds is, well,
being completely disengaged.
The average driver in the US has, overall, one serious, police-reported crash
every 17.9 years of driving. A good driver who chooses to drive alert, atten-
tive, and sober reduces that risk by a factor of three. This means that a large
portion of the US population will go through their lifetimes never experienc-
ing a serious crash. To match this, automated vehicles need to be damn near
perfect when they are deployed.
But Nothing Is Perfect, so When Will Automated Vehicles Be

Here?
By my estimate, it will take us another two years or so, at the very least,
before we see nearly perfect automated vehicles in limited use. That’s 2022,
if we’re being optimistic. I say this based on the fact that we’ve been testing
automated-vehicle technology for a long time at VTTI, and we know that the
deployment of advanced technology takes a while. Earlier I told a story about
testing forward collision warning systems back in the 1990s. It’s taken more
than 20 years for such systems to be integrated into newer vehicle models,
and we’re still not at 100 percent deployment. The same is true for auto-
mated emergency braking (AEB), which became available for the first time in
the US in 2013. AEB means that if your car senses you are going to crash and
that you are not responding, it will brake (very hard) for you. This technol-
ogy is accepted by everyone now, with 20 car manufacturers volunteering to
get it on their vehicles by 2022. Yet, we were testing AEB at VTTI more than
20 years ago. To put it into perspective, the chart below from IIHS illustrates
the time expected to deploy AEB on a widespread basis.

A realistic timeline of deploying advanced-vehicle technology. Source: IIHS
I point this out because 20 or so years is the standard amount of time it takes
to deploy new technology and get it through a transportation fleet. That is
the fastest rate of progress.
If we use the IIHS chart to illustrate the general trajectory of automated

technology deployment, it should take 13 years from the time the technology
is nearly perfected for about 50 percent of vehicles to have substantial
automation. That’s only 50 percent deployment by the year 2035—and we’re
assuming that nothing else goes wrong. It will take roughly twice that
amount of time (27 years, or the year 2049) before we reach the point that 90
percent of vehicles on the road have substantial automation. And this is just
an estimate. Automated-vehicle technology may not be deployed this fast
for any number of reasons, including the public’s willingness to accept and
adopt driving automation.
Automated Vehicles and You: What’s Your Risk Perception?

When will be the right time for you to purchase or ride in a car that drives
itself? The answer depends on how much risk you’re willing to take, or your
“risk perception.” Risk perception means that there is an actual risk asso-
ciated with doing something and, depending on the individual, there are
differing levels of perception of that risk. People are sometimes terrible at
judging actual risk. Just think about commercial airlines. Many people realize

that flying commercially is safer than driving a car, but they generally don’t
have an accurate sense of how much safer it really is. If you were to conduct
a survey, most people would say that flying is twice as safe as driving, but if
you look at fatalities over the years, it’s really 2,000 times more safe to fly as
it is to drive. The perception of risk is drastically different than actual risk.
Two factors will largely determine the public’s perception of risk with
respect to automated vehicles. The first is “dread risk,” which speaks to one’s
ability to visualize a scary outcome. For example, literally 100 people die
every day on our roadways, but people don’t view driving as that risky. For
some reason, they don’t imagine themselves in a car crash, thus manual dri-
ving gets a bye. Let’s compare that risk to, say, shark attacks. When a shark
attack occurs in the US, it is a tragic event, people get off the beach, and
it’s in the mainstream media for days. It seems that people have no problem
imagining themselves being bitten by sharks. Yet, the reality is that we kill
more people on roads in one day than sharks have killed in the last 200 years
in US waters.
The second factor in determining people’s risk perception is the degree to

which they feel that they have control over a situation. For drivers of auto-
mated vehicles, that risk is perceived relative to the control they have in
manual driving. This perception gets us into the concept of the risk-bene-
fit ratio. When drivers are eventually put in a situation in which they have
no control (e.g., fully autonomous driving), their perception of equal risk to
manual driving (i.e., drivers in total control) will be up to 1,000 times lower
(think commercial airline safety).
What will the risk perception be when it comes to automated vehicles? If we

assume that the perceived risk will be 1,000 times greater for autonomous
vehicles when compared to manually driven vehicles–and considering that
approximately 37,000 people die on US roads each year-this means that only
37 fatalities can occur each year in autonomous vehicles for them to be per-
ceived as safe as manual vehicles.
These are tough odds for automated vehicles to beat, made even tougher by
a few other factors. An important component of risk perception will be how
automated-vehicle-related crashes are treated in the media. For instance,
when a fatal crash involving the Tesla Autopilot happened in 2016, nearly 250
national media outlets covered the story. Yet, when a similar manual crash

occurred—that is, the driver crashed into the side of a semitruck at an inter-
section, resulting in one occupant death—less than five media outlets cov-
ered the story, none of which were national news outlets.
Within a span of about a week in early 2018, Uber and Tesla made national
news due to fatalities involving their automated vehicles. The Uber crash,
which occurred in Arizona, was the first known fatality involving a pedestrian
and an automated vehicle, in this case a Volvo XC90 SUV that was operating
in autonomous mode with a test driver behind the wheel. The 2018 Tesla
crash involved a driver operating a Tesla Model X in Autopilot mode that
crashed into a highway barrier in California. In both cases we saw immediate
media reactions, most questioning whether automated vehicles could really
operate ubiquitously and safely (not to mention questions of data use, tech-
nology updates, driver responsibility versus manufacturer/supplier respon-
sibility, liability, etc.). As a result, Uber pulled its automated-vehicle testing in
Arizona, while Tesla continued to assert that, relatively speaking, automated-
vehicle technology will still be safer than manual driving.
It is still unclear if the public agrees with Tesla. A January 2018 Reuters poll of
more than 2,500 adults found that two-thirds weren’t too comfortable with
the idea of being in an autonomous vehicle. An overwhelming majority had
more faith in humans than autonomous systems when it came to driving.
Add to this the fact that manually driven vehicles continue to sell at a brisk
pace and you start to develop a better picture of the realities of interest in
autonomous vehicles.
The Good, Bad, and Unpredictable: Autonomous Cars Will

Always Have to Deal with Drivers
There are still other factors to consider when you talk about large-scale
automated-vehicle deployment. (I hope by this point you’re starting to see
how complex this issue really is.) A big issue for designers of these systems is
that for decades to come—and probably forever—there will always be human
drivers on the road to contend with. Why? The history of driving tells us that
when new technologies are introduced, driver compliance is never 100 per-
cent. Let’s look at a few examples:

• Seat belts. Despite the ubiquity of seat belts and the fact that people
know they save lives, 10 to 20 percent of people still do not wear seat
belts.
• Drunk driving. Despite numerous campaigns and educational outreach
initiatives, 12 percent of drivers in the US admit to driving while intoxi-
cated.
• Automatic transmission. The automatic transmission was invented
more than 70 years ago, but even today 5 percent of vehicles on the
road have manual transmission, even though manual is generally more
expensive than automatic.
Another factor to bear in mind is that driving or riding in automated vehicles

can cause motion sickness. Our friends at the University of Michigan Trans-
portation Research Institute (UMTRI) found that about 12 percent of US
adults riding in self-driving cars will experience motion sickness at some
point. This actually makes a lot of sense, given that motion sickness is gen-
erally due to a lack of control over individual motion.
We also can’t dismiss the fact that some people just like to drive. There are
performance and sports car enthusiasts out there who are not proponents of
automated driving. If you spend any time watching The Grand Tour on Ama-
zon (or its predecessor, Top Gear, on BBC), then you’ve likely seen an entire
crowd of gearheads jeer at the mere mention of automated vehicles.
How does all of this affect the transportation system? In a utopian world we
would have perfect automated vehicles at 100 percent deployment, with all
of them following the same rules across the board. But this is a fantasy. Man-
ual driving will always be around, and there will always be manual drivers
who do not follow the rules, just as many manual drivers don’t follow the
rules today. Case in point: the average speed on US interstates is greater than
the posted speed limit. This means that more than 50 percent of drivers are
violating the law every day. Another example comes by way of Zac Doerzaph,
whose study of intersection behavior (mentioned earlier) found that less than
50 percent of drivers came to a full stop at a stop sign. Maybe that’s not
entirely surprising, but one stat from Zac’s study should raise some eye-
brows: the average speed for those who did not stop was 11 mph; some peo-
ple were up to 20 mph. The point is that automated vehicles will have to
operate in a world with manual driving, and it’s very difficult for automated-

vehicle technology to develop the intelligence to predict highly variable, and
rule-breaking, human behavior.
Yes, automated-vehicle deployment is happening on a small scale. You can

drive hands-off and feet-off in about six production vehicles. However, the
levels of autonomy (i.e., SAE Levels 3, 4, and 5) that allow the driver to safely
disengage from the driving task altogether do not yet exist anywhere in the
world. That’s right folks; all of those articles that you read about this auto-
mated small bus or taxi all have a safety driver or monitor of some sort. But
to circle back to the beginning of this section, deployment of nearly per-
fect autonomous-vehicle systems will happen no sooner than two years from
now. If you add 13 years for 50 percent market penetration, we’ll be at 2035.
By then you’ll have experienced a lot of automated-vehicle technology, such
as robotic taxis and highway driving. To get to 90 percent market penetra-
tion, we have to look ahead to 2049.
Among the automated vehicles you may see soon on the road are robotic taxis, like this
one in Las Vegas.
However (I can’t emphasize this enough), if the automated-vehicle technol-

ogy isn’t correct from the start, you can add 5 to 10 years to those numbers.
If they crash—and crash more than is deemed acceptable—governments and

drivers won’t accept the technology. They will slow it down because they
won’t buy it, or legislation will have to be passed to protect the public. This
could put us up to 2054 or 2059 for 90 percent market penetration.
No matter the timeline, it is imperative that we continue to pay attention

to what is happening on our roadways now. Fatal crashes are on the rise in
the US for reasons that are entirely fixable: lack of seat belt use, distrac-
tion, impairment, speeding, and drowsiness. We simply don’t have the luxury
of assuming driving automation will miraculously solve our transportation
problems.

Part III
How It Will Impact Users
I’ve saved one aspect of the automated-vehicle evolution for a chapter of its
own. Here I want to consider how this technology will impact users in the
real world.
Let’s start with the money question. When new automotive technologies are
introduced, they typically appear first in the most expensive luxury cars. This
is because they cost a lot. As of today, you have to shell out big bucks for even
a partially automated vehicle. Based on the manufacturer’s suggested retail
price (MSRP) data, model year 2019 vehicles with Level 2 driving automa-
tion cost around $80,000! The average price for a standard vehicle in the
US is about $35,000. What is the likelihood of drivers spending $80,000 on
a vehicle if they are used to paying only $35,000? Probably not that high.
Deloitte Review recently found that drivers are hesitant to pay more money
for advanced-vehicle systems. One reason for this may be that people are
doing a cost-benefit analysis and they can’t justify the added expense. A
US Census Bureau report found that the average commute time to work is
approximately 26 minutes, with about 25 percent of workers experiencing
a commute time of 15 minutes or less. Do you want to spend $80,000 on a
vehicle you’ll only be in for a short amount of time each day?
At least for a while, the people most likely to be impacted by automated-

vehicle technology are those with ample money to spend. In the long run,
however, all of us will feel the impact as the most sophisticated automation
technologies become increasingly integrated into our economy. For some,
the impact will be negative. According to a 2017 WIRED article, some econ-
omists believe that industries reliant on drivers could lose about 300,000
jobs per year due to driving automation. This is an understandable concern if
you’re a truck driver; how many will be unemployed if truck fleets are auto-
mated?

Mobility for All?
Many advocates of automated and autonomous vehicles feel strongly that
they will increase mobility across the board, including for people with dis-
abilities and those in lower socioeconomic strata. Let’s have a look at this
claim.
In 2015 the US Department of Transportation released Beyond Traffic 2045,

its strategic plan for where the nation’s transportation system should head
by 2045. The report points to a number of key challenges facing an aging
transportation infrastructure that is struggling to keep pace with changes in
technology, population, and climate:
• America’s population will have grown by 70 million by 2045.

• By 2045 there will be nearly twice as many older Americans as now;
they will need quality connections to medical care and related services.
• Between 5 and 10 million Americans are unable to drive because of dis-
abilities.
• By 2050 emerging megaregions could absorb 75 percent of the US pop-
ulation while rural populations will continue declining.
• Freight volume will increase by more than 40 percent, driven in part by
online shopping, adding extra demand to our transportation networks.
• Predicted rises in global temperatures and mean sea levels and more
frequent and intense storm events could drastically affect highways,
bridges, public transportation, coastal ports, and waterways.
• Low-income communities require special attention after years of
neglect that has only intensified economic and racial segregation.
Not surprisingly, the report stresses the need for significant public invest-
ment to address these challenges, including the funding of transportation
research and development, which can help us make difficult choices about
how and where to invest limited resources wisely.
One area that receives particular attention in the report is automated-vehi-

cle technology, which, the report claims, has the potential to be especially
beneficial in addressing the needs of traditionally underserved communities,
such as older drivers, those living in poor conditions, and persons with dis-
abilities. From what you’ve now learned in this book, I hope you can see why
the report makes this claim. At the same time you can also probably see why
The Future of Transportation, Part III | 143

the challenge of making advanced transportation systems ubiquitous across
all potential users is so daunting. For instance, automated vehicles could
make a huge difference in addressing decades of neglect and discrimination
in poor communities, but as the report points out, and as history tells us,
underserved communities almost always lose out in the planning process.
Will this change any time soon?
Addressing the needs of persons with disabilities presents its own unique
challenges. Ever since the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in
1990, transit services have improved to comply with new standards—thus
making transit more accessible to those with disabilities—but upwards of
one-third of the 5 to 10 million US citizens with disabilities still find that
their transportation options are inadequate. And as automation technologies
are more widely adopted across the national population, governments must
be prepared to address and mitigate the risks associated with increased
reliance on ever more sophisticated and complex systems so that our trans-
portation system remains safe, secure, and accessible.
A simple survey of current research being conducted on the transportation

needs of persons with disabilities shows numerous areas that still require
attention.
VTTI researchers in our Center for Vulnerable Road User Safety, including
my colleagues Jon Antin and Justin Owens, have been examining the needs of
people who are blind or visually impaired with respect to transportation net-
work companies (think Uber). This is an area in which few studies have been
conducted to date. For instance, network company drivers don’t have to be
trained to assist riders with special needs, so we are trying to determine the
degree to which this lack of training affects the ability of Uber and Lyft to
provide safe and reliable transportation options to these riders. This clearly
becomes even more complex if we consider autonomous vehicles such as
robotic taxis. Creating an autonomous shuttle that can meet the highly vari-
able needs of persons with disabilities is perhaps at least as daunting as get-
ting an autonomous vehicle to operate in the first place.
Other VTTI studies include assessing the general needs of drivers with
autism, how persons with disabilities interact with advanced vehicles, how
pedestrians with disabilities interact with advanced vehicles, and how senior
drivers adapt to Level 2 and Level 3 automated vehicles. At the Center for

Advanced Transportation Mobility (CATM) of North Carolina A&T University,
researchers are trying to determine the mobility needs of persons with dis-
abilities, with the goal of reporting on current needs and challenges. The
CATM folks are also doing research into mobility options for dialysis patients
in North Carolina. While paratransit options specifically designed to trans-
port dialysis patients to dialysis centers exist, they are not ubiquitous across
all counties in the state due to lack of funding from the county govern-
ment and decreasing support for health care services. If the paratransit
options available now—which have their own set of challenges and short-
comings—aren’t ubiquitously available, will the funding be there in the future
to support automated paratransit options?
VTTI’s newest automated vehicle is a low-speed, electric shuttle. It is being used initially
to evaluate whether an automated shuttle system could improve public transportation
access for vulnerable road users, such as the elderly and people with disabilities.
While the majority of these studies are ongoing, they will ultimately fill a
current gap in knowledge about transportation options in relation to under-
served communities. Yet, there are limitless other areas that need to be
explored here. What are the mobility options, for instance, for persons with
hearing loss, for amputees, for wheelchair users? What are the options for
those with physical impairments (such as epilepsy, cerebral palsy, multiple
The Future of Transportation, Part III | 145

sclerosis, spina bifida, or spinal cord injuries) or cognitive disabilities (such
as Down syndrome, dementia, autism, or traumatic brain injuries)? How will
transportation options in the years to come be made accessible to—and most
importantly, safe for—these underserved individuals?
Ultimately, the message I want to leave you with is that automated vehicles
have a tremendous amount of potential to benefit underserved communities,
but we still have much to learn about how best to design and deploy these
vehicles to safely and affordably meet individual needs. Even then, we must
realize that automated vehicles aren’t suddenly going to make everything
better and give everyone equal opportunity to increased mobility.

Final Thoughts
Question What You Read and Hear
In some ways, driving safety is a funny business. Those of us in the business
have our fair share of quirks. One thing you have to understand is that
our data fluctuate, just as with many aspects of science. There are always
new risks to analyze. New information continuously becomes available to
enhance our current data. For instance, texting on a cell wasn’t necessarily a
risk even 10 years ago, and browsing on a cell wasn’t even possible until a few
years ago.
One particular stereotype of driving safety researchers is that we are some-

what risk averse since we deal with risk every day. Because of that, and
because our data fluctuate and lives are on the line, we tend to be conser-
vative in our thinking and writing. In general, therefore, we are not the best
at getting information to you in a timely manner. Even when we are able to
get the facts to you via an article or press release picked up by the media,
the data may be presented in the wrong context or the main message we
intended to convey wasn’t there.
For example, when I was a young professor at the University of Idaho, my

friend and very first graduate student, Jon Hankey, conducted a study with
me that focused on fatigue when flying. (Jon is now the director of research
and development for VTTI and had a huge role in getting our naturalistic
driving data over the years.) This study looked at a pilot’s ability to respond
to an emergency situation after hours of mundane flight in a semi-sleep-
deprived state. The pilots we recruited were kept awake for 24 hours. We
then had them fly a simulator for two additional hours. It was an important
study, revealing that pilots can recover pretty quickly and effectively when
necessary. I was very excited, then, when the local paper came to do a story
about our study. It was the first news article for my research. Jon and I talked
to the reporter for about an hour, informing her of the merits and impor-
tance of our work.
At the very end of the discussion, the reporter said, “Wow, it must have been
hard on the pilots to fly that simulator after being up all night.” To which I
| 147
responded, “Well, yes, it was a little bit of torture for them to get through it.”
The next day, with great anticipation, I stopped by a newspaper stand on the
way to work. There was Jon and me with a caption that read, “UI Professor
puts sleepy pilots through ‘torture.’” Of course, I was shocked and dismayed,
thinking my young career would soon end abruptly. In retrospect, though,
we learned an important lesson and got a funny story out of it. To this day,
Jon always prefers to delegate media interviews to our other researchers.
I want to finish with a story. In 2003 I received a call from a Washington

Post reporter who was doing a story about an uptick in vehicle fatalities the
previous year. An advocacy group called Public Citizen, which was founded
by Ralph Nader, was advocating that the uptick was due to an increase in the
number of SUVs on the road as well as the lack of rollover safety standards
for SUVs. It turns out that regulatory agencies classified SUVs as pickup
trucks, so SUVs did not have the same safety standards, such as roof-crush
standards, as other passenger cars. The advocacy group had a worthy goal
and an argument with some merit.
The reporter asked me if I thought the increase in fatalities was due to the
lack of an SUV rollover standard. I replied that this might be one factor but
that there were any number of other factors that might also contribute to
an increase in the rate of fatal crashes. Moreover, any attempt to address
the problem would almost certainly require a combination of high-tech
responses (electronic stability control was being seriously considered at the
time of the Post story) and low-tech responses (such as wearing seat belts
and obeying the speed limit). The reporter then quoted me as saying, “You
have to have all sorts of things to really make an impact these days [on the
fatal crash rate]. The problems are getting harder to solve” and the solutions
usually end up adding significantly to the cost or weight of a vehicle.
My statements made it into the Post story. However, one person clearly
didn’t like what I had said. Ralph Nader was also quoted toward the end of
the piece dismissing my comments and those of others who were looking to
find solutions through the use of active safety technology or crash avoidance
technology. “Thirty years ago these guys were saying the same thing,” Nader
said. “These guys are incorrigible.” The implication, of course, was that we
were in the pocket of the car companies. After the Post story was published,
my employer received a letter from Public Citizen accusing me of providing
false statements and recommending that I be fired. None of this concerned

me at the time. In fact, I took it as a point of pride and actually put a framed
copy of the Post article on my wall.
What I’ve learned from incidents like these is that the driving safety industry
is made up of both scientists and advocates—and they don’t always see eye
to eye. While I’m certain that the advocates mean well, they will occasionally
cherry-pick or exaggerate what they want from scientific research to make
a point. They tend to be politically savvy, and they will go to great lengths
to make their advocacy issue matter even if it means ignoring or overlooking
complexities in the scientific data. In this case, everything I said to the Wash-
ington Post reporter was correct, but I was “in the way” of the single ingre-
dient that was being advocated. Ironically, I never disagreed with the merit
of rollover standards for SUVs; I just didn’t jump on the bandwagon and say
that this was the one ingredient in the 2002 fatality rate increase.
This leads me to my final point. Much of what I’ve included here is grounded
steadfastly in scientific fact, and some of it is on the cusp of being proven.
At the same time, some of what you have read is my opinion based on study-
ing and thinking about driving safety for more than 35 years. The majority
of information is based on driving data that come from drivers actually dri-
ving in a real-world setting, as opposed to data from laboratory or simula-
tor studies. These real-world driving studies offer a clear advantage: at this
point in time, crash risk can’t be estimated in the lab.
Some will inevitably disagree with aspects of this book. Others will misrep-
resent what I am trying to tell you by taking it out of context. Others still will
claim that I lack sufficient data to draw meaningful conclusions about dri-
ving safety and, therefore, I really ought to keep my advice to myself. With
this in mind, let me conclude by saying the following:
1. I may be wrong, but I am probably not.

2. At least I tried when others say we don’t really know the answer about
driving risks. To the contrary, I’m convinced we pretty much do know
the answers.
3. Question anything you hear or read about driving safety in media
reports, because I can guarantee you that much of it will be cherry-
picked or inaccurate.
4. I will update you in the future through any means practical if I change
my mind about what I’ve presented here, but don’t expect there to be
Final Thoughts | 149

too many updates.
Thanks for reading. Remember to stay alert and sober, stay away from trucks,
and keep your eyes on the road!

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Illustration Credits
Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations are courtesy of Tom Dingus or
the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
Figure 2. Photo by Tablexxnx. (CC BY-SA 2.0). (2016). Highway. Retrieved from
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tablexxnx/24599911119/in/photolist-
DtNYwB-DX8CA2-pTYqCx-5Cpj85-9zqX5U-2rMja7-ez37ox-816C9d-
PGzXmk-EVy5-51pcog-iNS6F-MbbGxJ-8fwKVZ-5hB12E-4yEh3p-8fA2Bh-2m
veEx-5CpiSu-e3Y5LJ-83wRQA-4yJxRm-bB2w1-KTyGg-
nXwicZ-4yEh86-8udouo-qLVYv-6H7SHC-aLAZWV-RuRSgi-RuRToP-
bFeVpw-RrgMN7-MCWS2W-K5Ewhk-h332u5-LtTc8J-84XHMb-Dms2wG-8f
wJai-66qJRS-aM4SjB-9usM34-4FfvyX-K6SGBe-4kxymz-R8LWoy-8KssSp-
cBJGeC
Figure 4. Photo from Dreamstime stock image library
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Officer Cpl. Micheal Elkins assists Alabama National Guard Soldiers as they
clear stranded traffic on Hwy. 59, Birmingham, Alabama. Retrieved from
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way_Patrol_assisting_Alabama_National_Guard_during_win-
ter_storm_(1-4).jpg
Figure 5b. Photo from Global Center for Automotive Performance Simula-
tion.
Figure 6. Car Seat Safety Advertisement by NDDOT. (CC BY CC0 1.0). (2018).
Car Seat Safety. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/nddot/
45218983462
Figure 8. Photo by Prayitno Hadinata. (CC BY 2.0). (2011). LA traffic jam = daily
occurrence !. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/prayitnopho-
tography/6806878281/
Figure 9. Photo by Ellery. (CC BY-SA 4.0). (2017). Blind Spot Indicator of
2016 Ford Focus 1.5T. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
| 165
File:Blind_Spot_Indicator-2016_Ford_Focus_1.5T_(mark_3.5)-
DSC_1455.jpg
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Equipment Showcases Autonomous TMA Concept. Retrieved from
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showcases-autonomous-tma-concept.
Figure 13. Photo by Logan Wallace
Figure 14. Photo from Oregon Department of Transportation. (CC BY 2.0).

(2008). Snow and ice conditions. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/
photos/oregondot/5124402104/
Figure 15a. Photo by MrX. (CC BY-SA 3.0). (2008). Key Deer on Deer Key.
Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Key_Deer_on_Deer_Key.jpg
Figure 16. Photo by Michel Curi. (CC BY 2.0). (2014). ChiTown Friday Night.
Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChiTown_Fri-
day_Night_(14684244008).jpg.
Figure 17b. Photo by Juliancolton. (CC BY CC0 1.0). (2009). Looking down
a rural dirt road after a bout of snowfall in Dutchess County, New York,
USA. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Dirt_road_in_winter.JPG
Figure 19a. Photo by Andrew Bossi. (CC-BY-SA-2.5). (2006). MD 124 (Mid-

county Highway) at Goshen Road, Gaithersburg, MD, USA. Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2006_12_15_-_124@Goshen_-
_EB_06.JPG
Figure 20. Photo from CSPAN
Figure 21. Photo by Scott L. (CC BY-SA 2.0). (2014). An officer with the Los
Angeles Police Department checks the sobriety of a driver in Hollywood
over the Memorial Day weekend. Retrieved from https://commons.wikime-
dia.org/wiki/File:LAPD_Memorial_Day_Checkpoint.jpg
Figure 24. Public domain photo

Figure 25. Still from the movie Groundhog Day, Copyright © 1993, Columbia
Pictures
Figure 26. Photo by Kgbo. (CC BY-SA 4.0). (2019). LimeBike scooters in Bris-
bane, Queensland October 2019. Retrieved from https://commons.wikime-
dia.org/wiki/
File:LimeBike_scooters_in_Brisbane,_Queensland,_October_2019.jpg
Figure 27. Photo by Jim.henderson. (CC BY CC0 1.0). (2009). Looking south
from 30th Street at bike lane in 9th Ave on a cloudy afternoon. Retrieved
from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bikelane_9Av_30_jeh.JPG
Figure 28. VTTI chart as based on findings from Simons-Morton et al. (2011)
Figure 32. Photo by Fuchs Robert. (CC BY 3.0). (2016). Stilfserjoch-Passo dello
Stelvio. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stilfser-
joch-Passo_dello_Stelvio_-_panoramio_-_Fuchs_Robert_(10).jpg
Figure 34. Public domain photo
Figure 36. Photo by TedX Salon
Figure 37. Photo by Marc dan der Chijs. (CC BY-ND 2.0). (2015). Testing the
Tesla autopilot (self driving mode). Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/
photos/chijs/22274503931/in/photolist-
dtNMk2-KSVnz5-9M2QU4-AMT3Ne-zT6hwJ-oorCEE-zWjDZe-eAEQoD-
okV4hS-6FxgTr-Fnc15o-FnbXbs-Gfm7Po-Gfm7CG-G9tVGQ-GbMR1r-GbMS
e8-GhD21n-FSwEH9-GbMRjx-FnnkQp-GbMQzg-GhD2Gx-GbMPEa-
G9tT6C-GbMP6p-Gfm5G7-GbMQsc-FnbXK3-GbMQhn-G9tTKJ-FnnoiR-
Gfm8KS-FnbYyh-Gfm7kY-Gfm8H7-FSwDu7-G9tVAs-GbMRAK-GbMPCX-FS
wEF5-Gfm7qY-G9tU7q-FnnmXz-GhD1Ti-GbMPTX-Fnnoun-JbAC7z-
dYz4sg-2fB64wL
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treal by CAA of Quebec. Retrieved from:https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Drunk_driving_simulator,_Montreal_by_CAA_of_Quebec.jpg
Figure 39. Photo from IIHS
Figure 40. Photo by Екатерина Волкова. (CC BY-SA 2.0). (2019). Self-Driving
Illustration Credits | 167

Car Yandex.Taxi. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Self-Driving_Car_Yandex.Taxi.jpg
Figure 41. Photo from Virginia Tech Daily. (2019). VTTI’s newest automated
vehicle is a low-speed, electric EasyMile EZ10 shuttle. Retrieved from
https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2019/05/053019-vtti-autonomousshut-
tle.html

About the Authors
Dr. Tom Dingus has been conducting transportation safety research for more
than 35 years. He is director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
(VTTI), which is home to the largest group of driving safety researchers in
the world. In collaboration with VTTI researchers and engineers, Dr. Dingus
has pioneered the naturalistic driving study research method and is working
to ensure the safe development and deployment of the next generation of
vehicular technology.
Mindy Buchanan-King is a project associate at VTTI. For the past 11 years,

she has turned “engineer-speak” into impactful articles and award-winning
publications.
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SURVIVE the DRIVE

A GUIDE TO KEEPING EVERYONE

with Mindy Buchanan-King

Tom Dingus has been conducting transportation safety research

Mindy Buchanan-King is a project associate at VTTI. For the past

Cover design: Alex Parrish

Published by the Virginia Tech

With Mindy Buchanan-King

V irginia T ech T r ansportation I nstitute

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

Virginia Tech Publishing

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

Series enumeration supplied by publisher.

Final Thoughts 147

Illustration Credits 165

About the Authors 169

Maybe the risk of experiencing a fatal or disabling crash looks, relatively

Fatality rate, per 100,000 participants

White-water kayaking 2.9

Ice, snow, or rock climbing 3.2

Scuba diving 3.5

Recreational boating 6.5

Understanding Your Risk: An Easy Math Lesson

I bring up the distinction between percentages and odds because people,

viii | Survive the Drive

When I assess the risk of a crash in terms of odds or percentages, I am

The Data Used

What is very hard, or sometimes even impossible, to gauge using post-crash

x | Survive the Drive

xii | Survive the Drive

xiv | Survive the Drive

ABS anti-lock brake systems

AEB automatic emergency braking

BAC blood alcohol content

CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

DAS data acquisition system

ESC electronic stability control

FARS Fatality Analysis Reporting System

FHWA Federal Highway Administration

FMCSA Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

GDL graduated driver’s licensing

IIHS Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

NHTSA National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

NIH National Institutes of Health

SAE Society for Automotive Engineers

VTTI Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

Force = Mass x Acceleration, or F = MA.

A side note to the F = MA lesson is that it is always better to be on the

2 | Survive the Drive

However, don’t be overconfident! Before you purchase one of these vehicles

Safety Factors beyond Weight … and My 1971 VW Bus

By contrast, let’s consider my 1971 VW bus. While driving my bus, my feet

4 | Survive the Drive

I was fortunate enough to be able to buy my kids newer cars. (Technically,

How a Crash Is Like Baking a Cake

6 | Survive the Drive

The following is an example from my own history to illustrate this recipe

Simple Ways to Reduce Your Risk | 7

As we were known to do, we had a spirited weekend—all the while, something