WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Capt. Jeff Weible of the Wichita Police Department stood on a sidewalk on Douglas about a year ago, off duty, talking with an emergency room doctor. They watched as a motorcyclist rolled by, texting with both hands, at a speed Weible estimated at 35 mph.
One trouble with distracted driving, Weible said, is that "you are not monitoring your surroundings."
Another is that you could get killed.
"Yeah, that guy could end up in my ER," Weible remembers the doctor saying.
Many other drivers who looked illegally at cellphones or iPads or even DVDs have crashed and died. They've killed passengers and pedestrians, children and bicyclists and other drivers. In Kansas, 76 of the 341 fatal crashes in 2014 were identified by police as involving a distracted driver, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nationally, in 2014, 3,179 people were killed, and 431,000 were injured in distracted-driving crashes, according to Distraction.gov.
Some people have speculated that the danger will decrease after technologists invent better hands-free tools, like smartwatches.
But Jibo He, a scientist from Wichita State University, just completed research showing how smartwatches affect drivers.
It's worse.
-----
Research on simulators
Before cellphones, distracted-driving deaths were a small percentage of annual highway death tolls.
The big highway killer has been, and still is, drunken driving. In 2014, there were 9,967 fatalities involving drivers with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 or higher, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's one in three highway deaths.
The National Safety Council now estimates that at least 27 percent of all accidents, from fatalities to fender-benders, are caused by distracted driving, said spokeswoman Maureen Vogel.
Unlike with alcohol, there's no real test for distraction. Unless drivers admit fault, it's hard to prove.
Jibo He is a psychology professor at WSU. The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/28Yc6CT ) reports that he tested dozens of people three years ago while they held smartphones and drove in simulators. They drove all over the simulated roads and simulated ditches.
Now he's tested 34 more drivers wearing smartwatches, which technologists are predicting will become more popular soon. One possible virtue of smartwatches as opposed to smartphones is that you can keep both hands on the wheel.
But the drivers with smartwatches took their eyes off the road, drove into ditches and sped up and slowed down.
Jibo He sat at one of his simulators the other day with a smartwatch strapped to his wrist. He touched the simulation accelerator, merged into traffic, reached over to tap the screen on his smartwatch - and steered into the ditch.
"Look at that," he said. "I was only trying to open an app."
-----
Fatalities
Kip Scott, 43, remembers learning to drive and how the distraction he got warned about, in that simpler time decades ago, was "don't turn the radio on."
But now people blow through stop signs, as a woman did so recently at West 37th Street North and North Tyler Road.
Scott hit the brakes in the intersection and watched as the woman's car shot past him. "She had her head down and didn't look up, or if she did, it was after she passed through the intersection," he said.
Scott, the owner and operator of Prairie Pines Festivals, said he and his wife have tried to coach their teenage son as he learns to drive. "The phone has to stay in the back seat when you drive, where you can't reach it," Scott tells him.
"But we're not so much worried about him as we are about him maybe getting T-boned by somebody else," he said.
Tyler Blake Pettigrew, a 27-year-old Emporia man, was convicted on June 15 of vehicular homicide in connection with a 2012 crash that left one person dead and another injured, the Kansas Attorney General's Office said. He was convicted of vehicular homicide, use of a wireless communications device while driving, speeding and following too close. Sentencing has been set for Aug. 1 in Lyon County District Court.
In Wichita, police have worked several fatality accidents caused by distracted driving in recent years
Two passengers died in Wichita in April when the driver of their car looked down at his cellphone to get directions and then hit a pole, Wichita police said.
In 2010, a woman driving west on Kellogg heard her phone buzz. She told police she took her eyes off the road to shut the phone off and hit and fatally injured a man who had stopped to remove debris from the road.
In 2008, a man was driving home on Tyler after a date with his girlfriend. Witnesses told police later that he was going too fast for road conditions and lost control, hitting a tree. He died.
Police determined that the victim had sent a text to his girlfriend just before crash.
-----
'It freaked me out'
Distraction is easy. Talking to a passenger can reduce a driver's safety, Jibo He said.
Daanyaal Akbar, a WSU student, is Jibo He's research assistant.
If you want to see how dangerous distracted driving can be, ride with a driver scrolling on a mobile device, Akbar said.
"I've ridden with friends who have done that; it freaked me out," he said. "You don't notice how much you're distracted when you're driving yourself, because you think you're in control.
"But when you're sitting in the passenger seat, it really brings it home."
The smartwatches Jibo He used in his research did not have the ability that many smartphones have to take voice dictation. Many smartphones now can immediately translate complex spoken words into near-perfect sentences that can be dictated into Facebook Messenger or text messages while driving.
But voice dictation still makes mistakes. "So the temptation to touch your screen while driving and fix the mistake will be very enticing," Jibo He said.
Hands-free technology is dangerous, he has concluded..
Technologists, including him, are working on solutions. At WSU, he has fine-tuned at least four apps or other inventions in various stages of patent approval.
One app would literally shut off your phone while you are driving, diminishing the temptation to check your phone. Another highway killer is sleepiness; he's working on an app that could monitor a driver's eye movements and sound a warning if the driver begins to nod off.
Another app would make itself aware of conditions your car is driving through - stormy weather or heavy traffic, for example. The app, sensing those conditions, would mute your phone so you're not tempted to answer a call or read a message.
The best move, Jibo He said: Shut your phone off while driving. Put it in the trunk. Leave it home.
"Most people won't do those things."
-----
Distracted drivers
In downtown Wichita, a few minutes after that woman drove distracted on I-135, drivers were rolling up to the stoplights at Douglas and Washington.
In the 10 minutes between 7:50 and 8 a.m., hundreds of rush-hour motorists rolled through. Sit curbside, and you can see what drivers from all four directions are doing.
Most kept their eyes forward and hands on wheels. But in those 10 minutes, perhaps 1 in 10 rolled up while tapping brakes in a herky-jerky way, with eyes darting up and down from their laps to their windshields.
Or they looked at the phones held in one hand while they steered with the other. There was also the guy driving and eating; his distraction was a banana he had apparently peeled while driving.
A young man wearing a yellow billed cap turned backward rolled up while tapping his brake repeatedly, his eyes darting up-down-up-down before he stopped, a little too close, to the car ahead of him at the light.
All these drivers were driving ahead or behind or alongside other motorists driving tons of steel: heavy-duty pickup trucks, a big silver tanker truck hauling milk and a number of heavy-duty trucks hitched to flatbed steel trailers loaded with mowers.
One thing we should never do, Jibo He said: "Never look at other drivers to see how distracted they are." Watching their mistakes will distract you, he said.
But you can easily tell whether they are distracted merely by watching their speed. Distracted drivers invariably slow down and speed up as they look at their phones.
If you see that, "steer clear."
___
Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
