IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 59

they drive. This divergence between
the distraction caused by no-look
texting and the driver's misguided
confidence that the practice is not
detrimental may help to account
for any rise in crash risk that may
accompany texting bans.
There is an important implication
here for traffic safety, and for the job
of raising public awareness of these
issues. Since no-look texting (like
regular texting, and like handheld
and hands-free phone conversation)
may result in dangerous driving
impairment, we should be mindful
about how information about this
topic is cast, and ultimately about
how traffic policies are drawn.
For example, consider the
account given by the authors of the
HLDI study of the rise in crash risk
they find to accompany the enactment of texting bans, namely, their
suggestion that this rise is the result
of drivers diverting their eyes to a
phone held below the dashboard.
One the one hand, this theory usefully points out just how dangerous it
is to send texts in this manner while
driving. On the other hand, this theory is problematic: one could come
away with the impression that nolook texting is safe since the HLDI
study accounts for texting distraction
exclusively through the issue of eyeball direction. That is, accounts of
the dangers of texting based exclusively on how a driver looks at the
phone, like that of the HLDI study,
may actually unwittingly encourage
the potentially unsafe practice of nolook texting. This goes for policy
measures as well. If traffic policy
fails to address no-look texting while
driving (in both its handheld and
hands-free forms), then these potentially unsafe practices could actually
be encouraged by implication.
As cell phone interface schemes
continue to advance, and as driver
behaviors continue to adapt, we
must be careful about how new data
are cast and about how new regulations are drawn. Even if drivers
learn to type without looking at the
phone, and even if voice-translation

technologies make manual and
visual contact with the cell phone
unnecessary, texting may remain a
dangerous form of driver distraction.

Author Information
The author is with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA,
U.S.A. Email: robert.rosenberger@
pubpolicy.gatech.edu.

Acknowledgment
The author thanks Dennis Koenig,
patrick McGinley, and Evan Wiener for comments on earlier drafts
of this article.

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