What the peek costs you

The obvious cost is the crash, and this book has deliberately not described one. But most peeks don't end in a crash, which is the whole problem of chapter 6, and if the crash were the only cost then the thousand safe peeks would have cost nothing. They didn't. Here's what they cost.

They cost the drive its attention, and not just for the two seconds. Strayer's voice studies found residual costs, attention that took time to come back after the task had ended. A peek isn't two seconds of absence. It's two seconds of absence followed by a slow return, during which you're driving with less than you had, and the buzz that comes next lands on a driver who hasn't fully come back from the last one. A drive with six peeks in it isn't a drive with twelve seconds missing. It's a drive that was never quite all there.

They cost you the rest. A drive used to be the one place the phone couldn't follow. It's not a rest now. It's a queue of small interruptions with a car attached. You arrive having driven twenty minutes and having spent them half in the car and half in a message thread, and you feel the way you feel after any twenty minutes of that, a bit scattered, a bit behind. Chapter 17 is about this.

They cost you the passengers' view of you. Your partner sees the phone on your knee and says nothing, or says something and gets told it's fine, and either way learns what your rules are worth. Your child in the back sees the lit face at the lights, and in ten years' time will be a new driver with a phone, and will have had two thousand lessons in what drivers do at red lights, all from you. Nemme and White found the norm predicts the behaviour. You're the norm in that car.

And they cost you the clean sheet, in a way you can't see. Every peek makes the thousand a thousand and one, and the thousand and one makes you surer, and the surer you are the less you check, and Sanbonmatsu found that the checking is the first thing the phone takes. The clean sheet is a record you can't cash. It doesn't reduce the next peek's risk by anything. It only reduces how much the risk feels like yours.

I'm not adding these up to frighten you, because chapter 12 showed that doesn't work. I'm listing them because "nothing's happened" has been standing in for "it costs nothing", and those are different sentences.