The UK government is — again — cracking down on driving while using a mobile phone. Tougher sanctions and sharper enforcement will no doubt make some difference. But the real risk of driving while impaired — either drunk, or using a phone — is not the risk of losing your licence. It’s the risk of being in a serious accident. That’s not enough to change the behaviour of some people. What will?
A cardinal rule of behaviour change is: make it easy.
A fine example is the idea of the “designated driver”, the person who stays sober and drives his or her inebriated friends home. It’s a clever concept. The designated driver is the hero, “the life of the party”, who makes it possible for everyone else to drink socially. Friends take turns to be the designated driver, tapping into deep habits of reciprocity. And the question, “who’s the designated driver?” reinforces the social norm that drunk-driving just isn’t right.
What’s the equivalent for texting while driving? It’s not immediately obvious. Distracted driving, like drunk-driving, is dangerous. But the parallel is imperfect because the decision-making process is very different. Having some drinks with friends, knowing I must drive later, is one kind of stupidity. Glancing at a phone which pings at me as I drive across town, then impulsively trying to tap out a reply, is a different kind.
Many of us have deeply ingrained habits of checking our phones and responding to their beeps. That’s not an accidental glitch in the interface: our phones are designed to interrupt us. Ad-funded apps need to attract our attention as often as possible. Public safety demands that we “make it easy” to ignore our phones while driving; the phones themselves want the exact opposite.
Most phones have an “airplane mode”, but not an obvious “drive mode”, despite the fact that your phone is vastly more likely to cause an accident in a car than in a plane. That should change. Smartphones should have, as standard, an easily accessible, well-publicised drive mode. Drive modes do exist, and in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been pushing the idea. But they’re not prominent.
Drive-mode phones might automatically read out text messages, automatically reply to such messages with “sorry, I’m driving”, and send incoming calls directly to voice mail — while allowing drivers to play music and use satellite navigation. In short, drive-mode phones would stop pestering us for our attention.
But why aren’t drive modes more popular? Perhaps we’re waiting for a clever marketing campaign: the “designated driver” idea managed to get itself into The Cosby Show and Cheers.
But we also have to recognise the perverse incentives at work. Many of us want to be distracted less by our phones — not just while driving, but in meetings, during conversations, at mealtimes and in the bedroom. The phones themselves want something rather different. Distracted driving is an acute symptom of a wider problem: distracted living.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times.
My book “Messy” is available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.