Tommy Denton

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After a summer of practice on the dirt roads that lace the remote regions of the Texas Panhandle, my father turned over to me the use of his 1954 Chevrolet Belaire.

That gleaming white-over-royal blue chariot stirred in my adolescent psyche an unprecedented wonder, pride and excitement. Such primal urges were part of the mid-20th century rite of passage for young American males, and so therefore a cause for profound paternal worry.

Thus was the condition imposed before the ritual handing over of keys in that summer of 1961: mind-numbing drill out in the dusty expanse not only in the art of smoothly shifting gears and other painstaking repetitions of the safe mechanical operations of a moving automobile, but also interrogations on the reasons for having taken certain actions or precautions -- or having failed to do so.

Like an unblinking eagle, my father observed and critiqued the coordination of hands and feet with my eyes as they alternately scanned the road ahead, the instrument panel, the arc of view from left to right and frequent reference to the rear-view mirror.

Accordingly, he would demand to know roughly how far from the fence line that Hereford mother cow and her calf we just passed had been grazing, or if I had taken into account whether my rate of speed would allow me to negotiate the curve ahead -- usually one I clearly had been too preoccupied to notice.

In large, empty parking lots we'd practice backing up and parallel parking -- over and over, for very good reason: His expectations always exceeded my performance.

Out in the neighborhood streets he would order turns, accelerations, decelerations or other maneuvers designed to hasten my response time and sharpen my coordination. From time to time he would point out intersections or near-blind spots that could create hazards every driver should be able to anticipate -- hazards I'd never even considered -- and require me as an exercise in quick thinking to tell him how to react to such an incident.

Whatever may have been on the training agenda, though, no "lesson" failed to include a firm restatement that reflexes or memorizing all the rules of the road would be futile if the driver failed to pay attention and exercise good judgment to avoid dangerous situations in the first place.

Then he said, "You wreck it, you pay to fix it." That got my attention.

Those days of innocence on my part -- and vexation on my father's -- came to mind after reading about the increasing incidence of auto accidents caused by driver distraction.

Automotive engineer Merkel Weiss wrote in The Futurist magazine for January-February 2007 that driver distraction is responsible for 80 percent of motor vehicle accidents. Drivers, he wrote, "have literally been lulled into a false sense of safety and security by the very sophistication of the modern car. Newer vehicles drive more and more effortlessly."

The result of such "advances," he wrote, is that security features play to the darker side of human nature by encouraging more aggressive driving, even now as traffic density is growing.

"If you build more-effortless vehicles, people will exert less effort -- and attention -- driving them," Weiss wrote. "Driver distraction is not so much due to sensory overload as to complacent driving."

That complacency manifests itself in an array of perilous diversions: chatting on the cellphone, shaving or applying makeup.

Among Weiss' technological remedies for "correcting" such distractions would be a network of monitors and sensors that can detect imminent dangers and sound a warning buzzer to alert the driver, perhaps even applying the brakes if driver reaction is insufficient.

Another suggestion was programming into steering mechanisms a virtual sensation such as driving a sporty roadster or even flying as a Top Gun pilot, thus enhancing the pay-attention factor.

Better yet, develop those sensors so they can detect tailgating, erratic lane-weaving or when some instrument other than the steering wheel and gear shift is in a driver's hand, pull automatically to the nearest safe parking area, shut off the engine, apply a forceful shock to the driver's posterior and display on a dashboard screen flashing red letters: "You're endangering public safety! Knock it off and pay attention!"

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.