Safety Crutches

My last post kicked off some interesting discussions with my friends. One comment I got back:

IMO all this lane following stuff is bad design. It trains drivers to be inattentive, then spazzes when it's confused.

And don't get me started on touch screens. Near unusable by drivers. On the recent family reunion trip, Dad rented a mustang. That thing had an extremely wide touchscreen. It looked cool but totally unusable by the driver -- at least safely. Chunky knobs should control the environment , not touchscreens. You want to be able to feel for them while keeping an eye on the road. A hundred years of designing instrument clusters has taught us that. But putting everything on a screen increases profit margin by a few percent. Jony Ive minimalist design aesthetic has done a huge damage to usability of devices. As well as Steve Jobs. Yes, a one button mouse is aesthetically pleasing, but it loses tons of efficiency of use.

Several comments directly on the post joined my disdain for these central screen control systems.

FWIW my problem isn’t with the idea of a nice large display that, with output from a competent designer makes it easier to present information that is quickly comprehensible with minimum attention. It is instead with the design philosophy encouraged with the advent of touchscreens - namely the ditching tactile controls for the information/entertainment system, excepting a subset made available to the driver on the steering wheel. Unfortunately that doesn’t help the passenger when the native screen application is dragged down by crappy and unresponsive programming. It also doesn’t help the driver when the steering controls don’t have an intuitively obvious means if any to control the same systems, and he has to take his attention off the road to figure out where things are on a dynamic screen to touch a certain spot.

In the early days of the Mac, a lot of UI research was spent on spatial memory and the importance of having things apepar in predictable places. Most modern systems including Apple’s, violate that regularly. On a laptop that’s an annoyance. Driving? It’s a safety issue. And more and more states want hands-free systems which ironically take drivers attention off the road just as much as not more given the shoddy interface and responsiveness of these car systems.

Many modern dashboards allow you to switch between mileage and performance info with (usually) convenient steering wheel controls. The latter though aren’t truly necessary. An oil gauge, a temp gage, a tach, an odometer, a fuel gauge, and a speedometer are all you need, with automatic transmissions largely making a tachometer superfluous. Everything else more recent cars provide is largely optional, but in the case of the last few cars I’ve bought, at least was well presented. Engineering is a compromise, and if you’re going to have an entertainment/info display, then between radios, CDs, connected phones and music players, as well as navigation or car status display, there’s a lot more to put on the screen than can be fit without swapping things out, no matter how big the screen is.

So how do you do it?

Well, one answer is to require the driver to look over, see a list of buttons that may or may not be comprehensible at a glance, and lift his entire arm to touch an arbitrary spot, with the only feedback being to look at the screen again to see that your touch registered. Or you can go older school. Have an actual volume knob that you can glance over to make sure your hand is in the right ballpark, then find and confirm by feel and texture, and you can feel the change in the knob and your hand position, or the click in the button, when you operate it, as well as any other feedback such as fans changing, volume shifting.

Even with steering wheel controls, a volume knob is equally operable by others than the driver.

A friend had a BMW with a central console knob that, in combination with the central screen menu design, made it easy to shift his hand forward and do everything by touch with far less attention to the screen while driving than any touchscreen.

Tangentially related - I’ve put together enough valves and components by feel, especially in tight spots.It is amazing what we can do by touch, especially while paying attention to other things around us.

Or we can take our attention off the road to focus on not only what’s being shown to us, but on where exactly we have to touch, and make sure our hand doesn’t waver.

Now, to be fair, a lot of “tactile” stereo front ends are a total mess as well, with small buttons that are hard to parse out, much less differentiate.

These principles apply to a lot. It’s part of why, even as touchscreen keyboards have improved, people still stick to real ones where practical and possible. The type of controller makes a difference in terms of controllability and feedback. If it didn’t, then the challenge of making games playable across consoles with gamepads and PCs with mice in first and third person shooters wouldn’t be a thing. Mice are far better at quick and precise changes in absolute position. On the other hand, you won’t see me trying to WASD my way through a flight sim instead of using a joystick of some sort. Despite gamepad joysticks being pretty good, there’s a world of difference between using a gamepad and a steering controller for a driving sim as well as a reason why we stick with steering wheels and gas pedals for real cars.

The old joke about how if all you have is a hammer applies.

Touchscreens in cars are a solution that almost causes more problems. Car controls should be operable by touch with little more attention than that needed to get your hand in the right general place. Many should be operable purely by touch and memory. Most controls before the advent of the touchscreen benefitted from decades of work on just this.

So let’s turn to safety crutches and skin in the game. I’m not a technophobe. I appreciate backup cameras, especially in tight spaces, and for all that ABS wasn’t the lifesaving silver bullet it was hoped to be, think it is likely justified in the lives it saves in edge cases. The problem is that upon realizing their cars would stop faster and safer, even on bad road, people promptly adjusted their driving habits to roughly the same level of risk by driving closer to the vehicles in front of them, or faster in bad road conditions, trusting in the brakes to help keep them safer.

Take air bags. One of the first issues that came up after their widespread deployment was the injuries the air bags were causing even in relatively low speed collisions after they fired off, because people are not all the same.

That air bag has to stop a 180-lb (now often 280-lb or more) guy , and the force required to do so is more than enough to bruise you up or break your nose. Worse, if you’re an (admittedly rarer now) 120-lb woman the force of it exploding out was enough to cause serious injuries. Pickup trucks soon came with cutoff switches so that baby seats could be safely placed in them without an airbag deployment killing the very child it was supposedly protecting. It’s also why passenger side airbags now often have a weight-based an interlock indicator that prevents deployment of the passenger airbag if the person sitting there isn’t heavy enough.

Why were these rushed out? Safety uber alles. yet one more piece of gear who’s weight resulted in my 2002 VW with a 4-cylinder having worse gas mileage than a mid-90’s v6 I’d owned despite better engine design, and I was hardly alone in marveling how fuel economy had gotten worse between the 90’s and the zeroes, even as cars became more expensive to fix and were getting totaled more often because of the costs of the various sensors and safety systems.

But there’s something even more obnoxious than the cost and time involved in replacing a windshield in a 2020 vehicle compared to it’s forebears because of all the associated sensors - and that’s the false sense of security.

You may have noticed the proliferation of little one-lane traffic circles in the US where previously a set of traffic lights would have been placed. They work, and they are a good thing. Traffic flows through them faster than it would with stop lights, and more safely, in part because there are fewer things the driver has to pay attention to to avoid an accident, but in part because without a false sense of security, people exercise more caution.

I mentioned ABS systems. Sure, they’re great, but people knowing their cars would stop more reliably led to people adjusting their driving habits to the same relative level of perceived risk. Traffic lights, stop signs, lane lines, while necessary and good at times, also provide a false sense of safety, that if you stay within the lines, you’re OK.¹

In the end, all of these safety things are an attempt to do our thinking for us. It removes our perceived skin in the game. Someone else has made a decision, the car will stop itself, there’s a light and of course it will be obeyed, and so it shifts perceived responsibility from the driver, who in practice has been shown to then reject it. When you talk safety systems that override the decisions of the driver such as automatic braking and steering, you run into a very real question of who is at fault and is the driver paying enough attention when something unexpected happens? Worse - especially when the systems flake out as has happened with ice on bumpers triggering auto-braking - can the driver exert control and this authority when the system overrides him? And who ends up truly at fault?

These safety systems disperse the responsibility, and whenever responsibility and authority don’t match up, when someone has authority over choices where the suffering the responsibility and consequences can be shifted onto others, you have a problem. Especially when responsibility is diffused and now no-one is.

Me, I look with a small degree of envy at the $13,000 Toyota truck becoming available in asian and other markets. I'm in the south so doing without air conditioning would be a hassle at best, but it’s still tempting. A truck, with a reliable drivetrain, and no extra BS.

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1. For mroe on this these links on Monderman and related principles are worth looking at.