Driving blind/YouTube

The ‘accident’ just waiting to happen

The highway as home studio

If you have any questions about why American roads have become increasingly dangerous, let ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit and talk show host Pat McAfee demonstrate.

They spent nearly 15 minutes in a face-to-face interview on the Pat McAfee show on Wednesday while Herbstreit was behind the wheel driving.

The highlight came when Herbstreit, while driving, covered his eyes to make the point that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is blind because “people are kind of just leading like this.”

The amazing thing was that no one – not Herbstreit, not McAfee, not anyone in McAfee’s in-studio crew – had the sense to tell Herbstreit, whose eyes were on his dash-mounted camera as much as on the road throughout the interview – to pull over somewhere while engaged in a conversation to which he was devoting much if not most of his attention.

Instead, McAfee encouraged Herbsteit to prattle on as a poster boy for “distracted driving,” one of the behaviors the American Automobile Association (AAA), the country’s leading organization for motorists, has cited as making the nation’s roads unsafe.

AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety in December reported finding that fewer than 35 percent of American motorists now qualify as “Safe Drivers.” The rest?

They are dangerously speeding, 32.6 percent; distracted, 19 percent; distracted and aggressive, 11 percent; and just plain “dangerous,” 2.5 percent. The small size of the latter category might come as a relief until one considers that there are about 233 million licensed drivers in the U.S.

Two point five percent of that is almost 6 million.

So if the AAA is right, there are about 6 million people on the road just waiting for the chance to kill you. But, hey, the odds are the Herbstreit’s of the world might get you first.

‘Zoom zombies’

Now, there is no way of telling from the video of the McAfee Show if Herbstreit was Zooming, FaceTiming,  or in some other way video conferencing with McAfee and sidekick Ty Schmit while they were watching him. It could have been that Herbsteit was only transmitting video of himself to them while listening to the show.

But the way his eyes kept flicking away from the road toward the dash, it appeared he looking at a screen.

And a variety of Apple-equipped vehicles now available in the U.S. do allow drivers to FaceTime although the in-vehicle video display is wired so as to block transmissions from the driver. The work around, according to a website for the owners of BMW owners, is to position your I-Phone on the dash so it can be used as a camera.

“I’m (a) commercial driver I make around 170k miles in (a) year (last 10 years) and believe I’m using FaceTime to talk with my kids that’s (the) only solution, that’s more safe than texting while driving,” Lenny_RDM posted there.

Some did disagree.

“Why does anyone ‘need’ to see you while you drive, put down the damn phone and stop putting other people’s lives at risk for your selfishness,” MPetey posted in response only to have Lenny explain that “for me(,) reason my kids can see me while I drive and my phone is on dash and I’m looking on road…And I’m not selfish.”

What exactly the difference is between watching a movie on your in-vehicle video screen and watching your kids while you talk to them is unclear, and most seem to agree that this is dangerous, although it remains legal in some states.

Alaska in 2012 amended its distracted driving law to make it illegal to watch videos while driving. The amendment came a decade after Erwin Petterson Jr. took his eyes off the road to watch a movie on a DVD player, allowed his truck to wander into the opposite lane of the highway and slammed head-on into a vehicle driven by  Robert Weiser, 60.

Weiser and his wife, Donna, 56, died in the collision. Petterson was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, but acquitted because the state had no law against driving while watching a video. Petterson was reported to have celebrated his acquittal by going for a long drive in his truck with his sister telling CBS News that “he hasn’t been able to drive in over two years….He’s very happy he can get on with his life again.”

Outside of Alaska, there remain states where the video-viewing loophole in distracted driving laws remains open, and filming yourself while driving, as Herbstreit was clearly doing, has become “Social Media’s Dangerous Trend,” according to AAA.

“Driving while filming is dangerous, so why are people on social media doing it?,” the AAA Magazine asked in August.  AAA Northeast senior spokesman Mark Schieldrop blamed the age-old problem of “monkey-see, monkey-do.”

“…I think it’s safe to say that the practice is increasing based on social media and even television, where it’s very common to see people talking to their phone when it’s mounted in the car. Whether they’re livestreaming, FaceTiming or recording videos to post later, it’s a highly distracting activity that will increase the risk of causing a crash, no question.”

Others have put the blame on the SARS-CoV-2-driven pandemic.

Root Insurance in 2021 warned motorists to “Beware of the Zoom Zombie: 54% of Americans Who Drive After Video Chatting Report Trouble Concentrating.”

“COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way we interact with our vehicles,” Root founder and CEO Alex Timm warned. “As many abruptly shifted to a virtual environment, Americans’ reliance on technology dramatically increased along with their screen time, causing a majority of drivers to carry this distracted behavior into their vehicles.”

Root cited data showing a majority of drivers dangerously attached to their phones, with the number consulting their phones while driving up to 64 percent of drivers.

“Many Americans have honed their use of technology and their ability to multitask during the pandemic but living room skills do not translate behind the wheel,” Timm said. “As drivers return to the road, they should recognize the dangers of false confidence to protect themselves and their passengers.”

As Herbstreit unfortunately illustrated, many drivers appear to still be acting as if they were sitting in their living room rather than behind the wheel of a potentially lethal weapon.

A lagging legal system

States have, however, been slow to react to this latest social trend. Georgia, Massachusetts, Illinois and Washington state have banned drivers from videoconferencing or filming themselves while driving, but the practice remains legal in some states and in a gray area in others.

In Alaska, drivers are banned from watching videos while driving, but the state statute makes no mention of transmitting. So, if a Herbstreit was driving in Alaska and only transmitting video of himself while engaged in an interview with another sportscaster, the action would appear to be illegal no matter whether it was unsafe.

This seems to be the case in many other states at this time. Illinois legislators decided to act just last year to clarify the law there due to a pandemic-driven uptick in road deaths.

The Windy City law firm of Coplan+Crane described distracted driving as an “an epidemic of its own in Chicago” during the pandemic “with more people turning to their computers, tablets, and phones to connect with loved ones or work remotely, cognitive distraction turned a lot of drivers into “Zoom zombies.”

“The cumulative effect of all this was more dangerous roads and highways for everyone, which in turn resulted in a fatal accident upsurge.”

Nationwide, traffic deaths spiked during the pandemic and have decreased only slightly since it ended. The National Safety Council now reports its “estimate of motor-vehicle deaths in 2024 is 44,680, nearly unchanged from the revised count of 44,762 in 2023.”

The 2024 number translates to about 122 deaths every day or five people killed every hour by motor vehicles in this country. At this rate, cars and trucks every 15 months kill almost as many Americans as died in the more than 19 years of the war in Vietnam.

And yet the large and growing problem of distracted driving that contributes to these deaths goes largely unnoticed by most drivers.

Not only was did McAfee and his gang fail to notice the danger of  what Herbstriet was doing in this case; the dangers seems to have gone unnoticed by almost everyone else as well.

A report on the show did pop up on the website “Awful Announcing,” but the reporting there had nothing to do with Herbstreit’s behavior behind the wheel despite the story being topped by a screen grab of him ignoring the road so as to concentrate on the interview.

Instead, the story focused solely on Herbstreit’s views on college football players now being paid to play.

And the fact that distracted driving could do to another college athlete what it did to Fletcher Cleaves, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after an encounter with a distracted driver in 2009, went unnoticed. 

Maybe McAfee, who seems a decent sort, should invite Cleaves, now an advocate for safe driving, on the McAfee show to make up for his hopefully unconscious effort to reinforce the new fad for teleconferencing and/or self-filming while driving.