Summer Silliness: Cars for Blind Drivers

It's mid-July, and lots of people are on vacation, wishing they were on vacation, or remembering the sea breezes and salty air and boardwalk fries from their last summer escape.  At least, that's what I've been thinking must be the case because of the recent silliness of news stories related to blindness that seem to tumble out, one on top of another, every single summer week.  It's just too hot to be thinking clearly.  That must be why scientists, in all seriousness, are developing a curriculum to teach people who are blind how to find their way by clicking like bats and dolphins, and why engineering students have used funding from the National Federation of the Blind to develop a car that, they claim, blind people can safely drive..

Yes, I know, quite a number of people disagreed with my take on the news story of last week that involved teaching people to use tongue clicks to find their way through the built environment.  Over the last several days, I have met, online,  a very competent O&M professional who is blind and who apparently quite effectively makes use of tongue clicks while he guides himself, and his students, through space.  To each his or her own, I concede.  But, I'm left still wondering, is a curriculum for tongue clicking orientation and mobility methodology worthy of all the attention the research project has received in the news media, and will people who are blind who click their tongues to orient themselves in space be more or less capable travelers, or more or less likely to be accepted by employers, colleagues, and their fellow sidewalk pedestrians?

Last week, it was the bat curriculum.  This week, it's the car for blind drivers!  You read it right:  A car for people who are blind to drive!

Not people who are legally blind with enough partial vision to safely and effectively utilize a bioptic lens while they drive.  There are, indeed,  legally blind drivers who receive specialized driving training in order to use the bioptic lens, and, despite some restrictions in most cases on when and where they can drive, they are allowed to drive in spite of their legal blindness.  I only wish I had enough vision to join their ranks.

I'm not talking about these legally blind drivers.  Rather, I'm talking about  a car  whose development was funded by the National Federation of the Blind and which engineers at Virginia Tech University has spent time and money building for people who are totally blind to drive!

There is hardly a blind person alive who has not indulged in driving fantasies.  Ours is such a car-focused society.  Everyone we know drives here and there and everywhere.  People who can see well enough to drive don't have to wait for paratransit vans to take them where they need to go.  If there's an emergency, they can zip off to the pediatrician or the E.R., or wherever, as quickly as they can grab their car keys.  People who can drive don't have to wait in the rain for buses, stand, hanging onto a pole all the way  through town on crowded buses and subway cars, clamber over snow drifts or negotiate icy sidewalks when they walk to work or shopping or entertainment.  Driving makes all of their lives so much easier!  And, believe me, I do not discount the convenience of living with family members who can drive.  I appreciate every single ride which accommodates me as a passenger who cannot see and therefore cannot drive myself.

Lots of us have taken fantasy one step further and actually conned some friend or lover into allowing us, however briefly, to get behind the wheel and propel a vehicle around a parking lot or down a road.  Once I drove, for about five minutes, until my totally unnerved husband took back the steering wheel and banished me to the passenger seat where I belonged.  We were driving from Kansas to Colorado, on those endlessly boring and very straight roads that crossed the prairie. Cornfields loomed on either side of our rented car.

"I could drive here," I said.  "The roads are totally straight!  We haven't seen another car on the road for hours!  Really, I can drive."

So, I took the wheel and found that "straight" is more of a concept than an actual direction, and people have to make little corrections with the steering wheel, even when the road is straight.  This was before the glaucoma and before the cataracts and before drastic changes in my eye condition when "blind" meant only "Legally Blind," and I thought I could actually see pretty darned well.

It turns out that ten percent of normal vision is not all that much, and driving was outside the capabilities I could count on.

Here's a story that my friend, Melanie, who has always been totally blind, told me about the time she persuaded her now husband to let her drive around a deserted parking lot:

"Before my husband and I were married, he took me to a large parking lot adjoining a county park on several occasions, to let me have the experience of driving.  We always went late at night in an effort to insure that the lot would be empty and he'd let me cruise around the lot two or three times.  The last time we were there, my husband failed to notice the presence of another vehicle in the shadows.  He had turned off the engine so that I could experience the whole process of starting the car, stepping on the gas, and pulling out. I got the car started and was about to step on the gas when we heard a voice coming over a loudspeaker."

"Cease operation of the vehicle!"

All the lights on the police cruiser were  flashing.  We did as we were told, accompanied by sincere apologies.

The officer who approached my window was not smiling.

He asked me to let my husband drive from then on, as he had figured out what we were attempting to do and couldn't let us do it on county property.

Many people have told me about growing up on farms and driving tractors and other farm vehicles.  Lots of us truly loved driving the bumper cars at amusement parks.  Many have participated in the fund-raising "Braille Rally's," in which a blind navigator practices his or her orienteering and braille-reading skills while guiding a sighted driver through a pre-scripted course of travel.  Every spring, it seems, there are news stories about blind drivers who climb into racecars and drive them, hell-bent for leather, across desert straight-aways, to raise money for one charity or another. I tell people that in my next life, I plan to be a truck driver, so I can go wherever I want whenever I want to go there!

But, spending money to develop a car that can be safely driven by people who cannot see where they're going?  Come on now, I checked to make sure it wasn't "The Onion" I was reading!

This is how the newspaper article at Eurekalert.org describes the car: 

"A retrofitted four-wheel dirt buggy developed by the Blind Driver Challenge team from Virginia Tech's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory uses laser range finders, an instant voice command interface and a host of other innovative, cutting-edge technology to guide blind drivers as they steer, brake, and accelerate. Although in the early testing stage, the National Federation of the Blind -- which spurred the project -- considers the vehicle a major breakthrough for
independent living of the visually impaired."

Apparently, the engineering students, and more unbelievable, the National Federation of the Blind believe that such a car is a real possibility for people who are blind at some point in the future.  The laser range finders serve as the "driver's" eyes, and the "driver" is guided by a vibrating vest in addition to voice commands emanating from the computerized navigation system.  A spokesperson for the NFB describes the project as the National Federation of the Blind's "going to the moon project," which means, I suppose, that they fully expect to be driving cars similar to this prototype, independently, and safely, down highways and byways, and interstates at some point in the future.

Now, I am the first person to extol the virtues of assistive technology!  But this car project is taking the concept of assistive technology way beyond its current role of helping me to read, write, keep track of my life, know the temperature of my roasting chicken, and use my cell phone, to a place where, truly, assistive technology is not meant to go!

Mechanical systems fail.  Even the best of them.  Even those with the best safety records.  A month ago today, the automated system that controlled Washington's Metro Rail subway cars across the system that thousands of commuters depend upon daily failed with disastrous consequences, for the nine people who died, and those who were injured, and for all of our confidence in a system and a technology that we have relied upon since the 1970s, and which has, until now, heralded its safety record as one of the best in the history of subway travel.

It seems to me that the Federation whose slogan is, "Changing What It Means to Be Blind," and who disdains spending research time and dollars on finding a cure for blindness, which their leaders  define as "a mere inconvenience, has gone over the edge!  The edge that separates wishful thinking from mindful thinking.  The edge between what might be technically possible, and what might be in the best interest of people who are blind as well as the rest of the population, who are not.

If "The Car for The Blind" was a joke, or even a high school science fair project, I would be chuckling and feeling indulgent.  But, it's not a joke!  NFB spokespersons talk about the next iteration of the prototype as an electric vehicle and point to a time in the future when blind people will be driving similar vehicles along with all the sighted drivers on the nation's streets and highways.  They are planning for the day when the Federation  will begin actively campaigning in the 50 states to change the laws that restrict people who cannot see where they're going from driving.

With the promoted-as-unsinkable Titanic embedded in our collective consciousness, and memories of an exploding Challenger still bringing us to tears, and constant reminders of last month's horrific Metro crash penetrating our daily consciousness, how is it that the Federation can put their faith in a mechanical system that would be safe enough to guide drivers who cannot see down our roads and highways?

The only explanation I can come up with is summer silliness!