flagyl...I'm not 100% sure it isn't a distraction. If one's tuned to the news and something important is said, one's attention is drawn to that. That's the definition of distracted driving, no?

Yes, HUDs are already a reality...however their intent is to impart vehicle info...ie. speed [not what the latest twit said on twitter]...and are thus BETTER than looking down to a normal speedo position.

It's one good argument for cruise control in your car.... as is wheel-mounted radio buttons etc...so you're not 'searching' for a knob in the middle of a console/whatever.

Arguably, automatic transmissions...rain-sensor wipers....reverse parking proximity warnings etc are all BENEFITS to a driver's concentration levels.

60mph is 88 fps.  The time you take to get the latest text from your BBF is about the same time as to be halfway down the next block after running down a rug-rat stepping off a bus and being side-swiped by that SUV that had the green while you had the red.

Military aircraft are [obviously] a lot faster.... but when it comes to 'traffic' issues....they have proximity radar....ATC looking out for them....and when it gets all to hard they'll have their own resident 'JAFO' to tell them when to close their eyes and pray....

One of the side-effects of high-end motor racing is the trickle-down effect of improvements to technology re driver aids....eg. an F1 driver needs to process copious amounts of 'logical thinking/reflex conditioning' just to survive a lap without disappearing into the scenery backwards.....  That's why there's such a thing as a 'Super Licence'.  Not everyone can do it.  MOST cannot.

.....and their traffic is all going in the same direction.....with no intersections [in theory, at least]....

.... oh...and there's a bunch of officials trackside signalling them if there's any iminent danger...

let's not forget that due to the high costs the talent pool in motorsports is very small. it probably has the highest millionaire heir ratio of all sports (Chilton or Nannini come to mind right now and i'm sure there are plenty more)

or remember Luc Alphand, who after he got to old for alpine skiing, made a pretty successful motorsports career.

also it seems that many people here underestimate what the human brain is capable of. sure, if all the roads in your place are going straight and people obey nanny speed limits, you'll never learn how to drive a car. that's like learning to climb in the mountains of Florida then probably even the radio might distract you so much that you'll drive your car into the next tree.

now compare that to the other extreme, traffic in a major city in India. where you have seven or eight vehicles on two lanes. up to five people on a motorbike, holy cows roaming the streets (this is not a cliche) and nobody following any rules. still there are few accidents and less traffic jams than in Europe.

does that mean Indians are smarter than Westerners? no, they are just used to drive with much higher attention levels and are not easily distracted. one just learns to rise to the occasion.

so does that mean i'll like the idea of Google Glass for driving?

no, not so much. it is just too capable to be non-distracting, and people will forget or willingly ignore any probably not even existing car mode. i could also imagine that information staying at the same point while moving your head could be difficult, a windshield hud is a better solution although more expensive.

i wonder how many samples did the Department of Transport get to do their studies though? none, right? 

Sure, that's why humanity has risen above its stone age mentality. The brain evolved a certain way. Not the way you'd have wished, though. Unfortunately, the brain does not work that way.

"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."

"When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they're not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal," said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. "That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information.""

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html

Do I wish it were different? Yes. Is it? No.

First of all: Yay for the Brits pre-empting Google Glass with a road-ban. Research has shown time and again that driving while carrying out a conversation, be it handheld, handsfree, vocal or through texting is very, very dangerous. Humans should not be doing anything else while driving, period, but carrying on a conversation is one of the worst things you can do.

Warning: wall of text!

Many people underestimate just how bad humans are at multitasking. When it comes to multitasking, we suck. We believe we can do it, but we can't, really! Don't believe me? Look up the myriad of attentional blindness tests. Hell, look up the myriad of tests regarding cellphones and driving. Driving while calling "handsfree" really isn't all that much better than holding the phone. Only "not having a conversation" is much better. Calling, texting or whatever using voice, or a HUD because then you can then "keep your eyes on the road" is an illusion. If you're paying attention to a conversation, you are not actually seeing nearly as much as you think you are (again, see attentional blindness), regardless of where your eyes are looking, leading to a severely increased reaction time, or even no reaction at all.

As for the German lack of speed limits. It's crazy. Going those speeds is nothing short of suicidal and in fact insurance companies won't pay if the driver exceeds certain speedlimits. Whenever I get passed by one of those maniacs (I occasionally pass through Germany) I sure as hell hope they aren't doing anything cellphone related. Having a cellphone within reach (and especially when using it) whilst driving is irresponsible, regardless of laws. Humans were never designed to  go 100 kph (60 mph, our natural top speed is several factors lower), let alone much faster than that: our reaction times are already slow to begin with (which is why keeping a safe distance is so important), increasing them by doing something else is not a good idea.

As for radio: yes radio can be a distraction. But it is a one-sided conversation, requiring no user input. This severely limits the amount of attention required to sustain "radio" while driving. There are no social rules to violate when the driver suddenly can't pay attention to the radio anymore, nor does the driver have a maximum social response time before the silence becomes rude and if he/she misses half of the subject, who's going to notice? Still, many people subconsciously realise that even the radio is a distraction: whenever it becomes busier on the road (the exception being already IN the traffic jam) or special attention is required (such as when looking for direction-signs) a lot of people will turn down the radio. I once saw Jerry Seinfeld mocking this habit during the "stand up" bit he opened his comedy series with, but it is a characteristic that actually marks an attentive driver. Radio also has one major upshot: although driving safely and attentively is a very intensive task, it can be incredibly booooring. Radio keeps people awake, and awake and slightly-distracted (with no social obligations to their distraction) drivers are still much better than fast-asleep drivers.

HUDs can be useful in some cases though, but only if they aid in driving, not if they aid in doing something else. If they give you your speed without looking down, inform you of the topography of the road ahead (I am so glad tomtom displays a map alongside the voice information so I immediately have a clear idea of what is coming and can thus pay better-directed attention) and inform you if you don't keep enough distance, they can actually minimise the time you spend distracted while looking those things up yourselves. Keep in mind, however, that displaying the speed in the HUD is NOT better because it keeps you looking forward, it is only better because it SHORTENS the time spent paying attention to something else (finding your current speed). Whilst looking at your speed, you are effectively blind for anything else, no HUD will change that.

As for the India example. I am very curious where you got your information from that Indians are somehow better drivers. Having been there myself, I don't recall seeing anywhere near as many accidents in the Netherlands as I saw in, for instance, New Delhi. And I remember a ton of traffic jams... (it's not just Holy Cows, it's also pedestrians, camels and elephants on highway-like roads. Official lane-count 6, actual "lane use" 10. Still, because firsthand experience is not  representative test, I decided if to see if I could back up my impression through raw data:

Fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles per year:

Netherlands: 7

United Kingdom: 7

Germany: 7.2

United States: 15

India: 100

Although there are nations with even ten (!!) times the fatality rate of India, countries with better organised roadtraffic do MUCH better than those "awesome" Indian drivers. They might be good drivers, but the sheer chaos is getting a lot of people killed. (Yes they aren't helped by generally having lower-quality cars and there are other factors at play, but the magnitude of the difference strongly suggests that a crowded, chaotic driving environment is detrimental to traffic safety, exactly what laboratory studies show. This environment, btw, does not stop Indians from texting/calling behind the wheel (first-hand experience).  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate)

India does score lower than the USA in one statistic though:

Fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year:

United Kingdom: 3.59

Netherlands: 3.9

Germany: 4.5

India: 11.8

United States: 12.3

I'm gonna propose that the extra-high number of casualties in the US is due to the immense vehicle-penetration of the American society, although the USA does perform worse than the European nations mentioned. (I didn't look at southern and eastern european nations and am willing to believe they don't do as well as the strongly regulated UK, the Netherlands and Germany (in spite of it's free-speed highways, less than 50% of the highway surface is actually unrestricted).

Driving whilst distracted is dangerous. To you AND to others. Simply don't call and drive. If you must call, park your car, if you can't, keep it as short as possible and very FYI. If you must "be social" and drive, wait till the Google Car can drive for you...

i don't think this study fits here.

no matter whether your car has a HUD, or a navigation assistant, or a dashboard (most cars have one nowadays), no matter whether local authorities put up traffic signs or if there are more people on the road as usual; there's a lot of visual and audio information the brain has to filter, but you are still doing one task: driving.

now, if one would answer a phone call or drink some coffee while driving, that would be multi-tasking. but that's not what we are talking about here.

Is this not the topic "England and Google Glass", discussing the pre-emptive ban on Google Glass precisely because of its outside-driving features and multi-tasking temptations? Because that's what I thought this topic was about.

And as a matter of fact, driving is already multitasking with very diverse information coming in. This is precisely why it is such an attention-intensive process. Quite a few accidents actually occur because people where "distracted" by one attention-grabbing-and-possibly-important-piece-of information on the road (such as a traffic accident, or a swerving truck) only to miss another crucial piece of information (the suddenly lit break-lights of the car in front, for instance).

Driving is multitasking. Using HUD's and the like should only be done to reduce the multitasking complexity, not increase it. Google Glass functions much like a smartphone, it will very likely compound the multitasking issues while society presses for more multitasking, especially socially. A study on multitasking therefore fits quite well in this topic...

i was talking about the inner city traffic.

most of the fatalities happen outside of the cities, mostly involving tired truck-drivers or bus-drivers of privately-owned companies. 

Would you please back your claim up with some statistics? Again, from first person experience, Indian cities are NOT safe when it comes to traffic, even when the inevitable gridlock occurs...

If I understand what you're trying to assert moshi, driving is at some level processed differently than all other inputs. 

That simply isn't correct. It is a complex behavior comprised of visual, auditory touch, motor activity, their integration and modification.

It is extremely complex (and takes years to learn), and adding anything to it won't happen "in parallel". You have only one mind. Therefore, anything added requires stopping one and processing the other. Yes, on a cerebellar level, your foot and hands remain in the same position (after learning how to do that) but that is the final common pathway (not exactly, but close), and the "processor" slows because additional inputs are being added and thought about.

Adding input slows the processing.

there's this:

http://morth.nic.in/writereaddata/mainlinkFile/File761.pdf

it's pretty large document, but you can look at the amount of fatal accidents involving three-wheelers which are very common in inner cities, but very rare on national highways is low, while the amount of trucks is high.

i am not saying that traffic in an Indian cities is safe. but from my personal experience, while i never had an accident involving an other party here in Europe, it would not take longer than ten minutes until i crash into an other vehicle should i try to drive a car in Ahmedabad for example. and it would be completely my own fault. the only thing i dare is driving a motorcycle in rural areas. if you would throw a bunch of Westerners into the Indian inner city traffic i am sure the vast majority would fail miserably. crossing roads by foot is hard enough for the first few times.

It's actually spatial processing within all FOUR dimensions. It's difficulty is an exponential function of speed.

....and there's also a ridiculous number of 'drivers' out there who are incapable of doing it all backwards....and reverse-park....

moshi ...I'm sure Indian roads are as safe as their railways...

of course adding input slows the processing. the question is whether the brain is capable of handling it. 

when i used a navigation assistant for the first time, it sure was an odd feeling and i looked at more often than necessary. now it has zero impact (i'm sure it has some, but practically there is none). the brain got used to it, and it was pretty fast doing so. it may even make the whole driving safer as i no longer need to look out for road signs as much as before when driving in an unknown area.

the brain is just awesome. one just needs to look out of the window and realize how many things there are that you actually see, but do not notice because only the relevant information is processed further.

well, my point was that the human brain is capable of processing a much higher amount of information than some people in this thread think. i am sure nobody would argue that a huge amount of people on the road combined with what in our eyes is sheer chaos (actually it is not, it's pretty fascinating to watch the structures from a rooftop) is a higher amount of information to digest than just adding a HUD. still people do drive there, and so could anybody after a while (although it might be a tough learning process). the human brain can and will adjust.