Systems of Safety

I sat in the back seat, listening to my friends talk. We approached a red light and stopped, waiting to turn left. The light turned green, and my friend accelerated instinctively, still talking. But he hadn’t waited for the oncoming cars to pass. In front of us, vehicles blared their horns as we drove towards them, all of us shouting for our driver to stop. He slammed on the brakes, and we avoided a collision. This story has always stuck with me as an example of how, when driving on autopilot, small distractions are all it takes for major error. However, it takes time to reach this state where small distractions can be life threatening. More importantly, it takes someone slowly letting their guard down as they become familiar with driving. Once someone starts driving on autopilot, they stop thinking about the road. To resist this tendency to stop paying attention, a safety system that maintains driver alertness is needed. One of the ways that driver education reduces deaths is through teaching students some of these systems. Driver education helps drivers establish systems of safety which prevent familiarity from turning into laxness. 

 

The more that someone drives, the more familiar with it they become. This familiarity is not a problem in and of itself, rather it can disguise distractedness or recklessness. Over time it is easy to stop being as cautious and cut corners because last time they did it, everything worked out fine. And people do cut corners, often unintentionally. When I initially started driving, I was extremely cautious. My focus was on being vigilant and safe. But, as I became more accustomed to driving, I grew less careful, and paid less attention. Not intentionally, but because with familiarity came comfortability, and then slackness. When I realized this, it alarmed me: I was becoming a worse driver without noticing. 

 

To remediate this problem, I instituted a system of scanning the road, the dashboard, and looking for obstacles. Immediately, my driving improved. My accidental negligence involved a lack of structure. Now that there was a checklist, there was less risk of forgetting to be aware of my surroundings. However, this problem extends beyond just me. The tendency to cut corners is in every driver: to go just a little faster, focus just a little less, get just a little closer to the vehicle in front of them. 

 

These mistakes often go unnoticed because they are mostly harmless by themselves. But over time they build up, and when taken in combination, they can become disastrous. Examine the following scenario: Two cars are passing a small truck on the highway. Inside the first car, the driver is talking and unfocused after hours on the road. The driver of the second car is late to work, and closely following the first. The truck changes lanes and neglects to check his blind spot. The first car doesn’t respond in time, and is hit, the second car is too close to stop, and smashes into the first. What was an ordinary series of small mistakes became a three-car pileup on the highway. The drivers may have committed each of these mistakes (becoming unfocused, tailgating, not checking blind spots) dozens of times without consequence, until they all happened at once. The most important step to reduce driving deaths is to stop the buildup of errors before it is too late.

 

In aviation, this buildup of errors is a significant threat. To resolve this problem, the aviation industry has developed Safety Management Systems, or SMS. Certain parts of this organization-wide approach can be adapted to individual drivers to create systems of safety that reduce and reveal errors before they compound. In my story, this is how I resolved the slow decline into negligence: by creating a system. One of the ways driver education reduces deaths is by teaching students systems of safety, such as the Smith System. 

 

Taking the concepts behind SMS and applying it to driving gives several principles for good systems. Hazards should be identified proactively. For example: recognizing when a car is behaving erratically, when there is a warning light on the dashboard, or when someone is too tired to drive safely. These are also parts of situational awareness. Systems of safety involve being aware of nearby vehicles, scanning the roadway, and the dashboard. Finally, a good system should be repeatable: a checklist of things to quickly scan so that nothing is forgotten or left out, even when the driver is tired.

 

To prevent familiarity from turning into slackness, it is essential to educate drivers on implementing systems of safety. When familiarity with driving grows, small mistakes can slowly compound, and driving becomes less and less careful, until someone is driving irresponsibly without realizing it. When that happens, it is only a matter of time until there is a collision. An important way to reduce driving-related deaths is to stop this buildup of errors through creating systems of safety. Applying the concepts of aviation SMS to driving, good systems are proactive, maintain situational awareness, and are repeatable. One of the best ways to become a safer driver is to implement systems of safety, and to encourage others to do likewise.