“Why do firemen wear red suspenders?  To hold their pants up.”  The humor in that old joke results from using the word “red.”  It focuses our attention on the color of the suspenders rather than on their purpose. It distracts us from the obvious truth.

Ironically, in our attempts to remedy the problem of distracted driving, we ourselves can easily be distracted.  Instead of focusing on the root cause, we can concentrate on the symptoms:  the tragedy, the remorse, the irresponsibility, and even the distractions themselves.  Such matters can be addressed directly, but that will not eliminate the underlying cause.  We can pass laws against multi-tasking behind the wheel, but they will not be readily understood and accepted by a public comfortable with phoning, eating, electronically navigating, texting, and so forth while driving.  They will be met with resentment and ultimately disregarded.  We can, using purely emotional appeals, elicit pledges from people never to drive distracted.  However, promises resulting from emotional manipulation unaccompanied by convincing, rational arguments, are short-lived and make little real impact on behavior.  We can do public information campaigns that “educate” people about the dreadful consequences of inattentive driving.  Unfortunately, such projects also routinely rely upon sensationalism rather than on persuasive arguments demonstrating irrefutable truth.  Ultimately, they fail too.  We can force electronic technology providers to diminish their products’ apparent intrusiveness.  But this technology is designed and intended to be interactive.  It can never operate without attention and careful input from its users.  Moreover, none of this will address non-technological distractions like rubber-necking, music, in car arguments and jokes, applying cosmetics, eating, reading, etc.

The underlying cause of distracted driving (and most other driving misbehaviors) is our absurdly oversimplified paradigm for driving:  operating a few automobile controls, keeping the car on the road, noticing major landmarks like traffic signals, and now and then desperately attempting to avoid already full-blown accident situations.  A realistic new paradigm is necessary.