Australian drivers are a distracted bunch, spending almost half their time behind the wheel with their attention divided between the road ahead and other matters.
That is the key finding of a landmark study based on in-car footage captured during thousands of trips by motorists who agreed to participate.
And the researchers are alarmed.
For three months, road-safety analyst Ann Williamson volunteered to have her own driving habits analysed on camera, along with hundreds of other drivers.
Professor Williamson says the results were rather startling.
“When you start to think about what you experience when you drive, it becomes really obvious that there are lots of things that are quite a challenge to driving,” she said.
The Accident Research Centre at Melbourne's Monash University filmed the drivers in their vehicles over nearly 2 million kilometres.
And the head of the centre, Professor Jude Charlton, says one of those big challenges faced by the study group seemed to be focusing on the road.
“About 45 per cent of the time that people are behind the wheel, they are doing something else other than driving. So, about one secondary activity every 93 seconds, or thereabouts,” Dr Charlton said.
The researchers found those activities were not confined to the usual suspects.
Using mobile phones was just one of many distractions.
Professor Charlton says drivers were also found with their eyes off the road while eating, combing their hair, adjusting dashboard controls and talking to other passengers -- as well as their pets.
“And that was one of the things, actually, that was so surprising to us is the diversity of activities that people were engaging in. Drivers clearly don't think that these are taking their attention away from the road,” added Dr Charlton.
There were potentially tragic consequences.
Six per cent of those non-driving tasks resulted in what were termed “near-misses.”
Professor Williamson says drivers need to understand their priorities.
“And whilst you can do two things at once, the primary task here is very much about driving and keeping your eyes on the road,” said Prof. Williamson.
The distraction analysis was part of a wider study of in-car behaviour that involved almost 400 drivers.
Professor Raphael Grzebieta, one of the chief investigators for what was called the Australian Naturalistic Driving Study, explains.”We're observing Australian drivers in an Australian environment, when it's stinking hot, when it's cold, or when we're out in the rural areas, when we're on poor roads, when we're on good roads, and we're able to observe how they cope with those conditions,” says he.
He says drivers forget the cameras are there after a while and, as he puts it, “are doing all sorts of things in these cars.”
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