Drowsy driving kills thousands of people in the United States each year. We’ve all been there:  You are driving down a boring interstate highway at night.  You start to nod off and, just when you about to enter la la land, you “snap out of it” and clutch the wheel, your heart racing.  Scary, huh? And you were one of the lucky ones.  Other drivers, succumbing to the sirens of sleep, crash and burn.

But a new device being developed may keep drivers like you awake and save your life. Here’s how it works:

A Bluetooth headset fits on one ear and points an infrared sensor toward the eye to detect blinking. (See photo). The driver’s blinking frequency indicates drowsiness. The data is transmitted by Bluetooth to a smartphone. If the sensor detects drowsiness, the headset vibrates, flashes and beeps to alert — and awaken — the sleepy driver.

I sometimes wax nostalgic about the “good old days” when my boys were toddlers: The petting zoos, the living-room wrestling matches, the cute things they would say. But one thing I definitely do NOT miss is struggling with car seats. What a pain! And I was never sure I had them in right.

Well, I was right to be unsure. Results from recent child car seat inspections throughout New York State revealed that out of 931 random car seats inspected only 112 seats were installed correctly. That’s only 12%!  Nevertheless, most parents — 96% to be exact — BELIEVED they had their kids correctly installed in the car seat.

What was wrong with the car seat installation? In some cases, the seats didn’t fit the child, in others they weren’t fitted in tight enough, in still others they were installed or positioned incorrectly.

I love traveling to far flung places, and when I do I like to penetrate deep into the places’ streets and culture. Speaking several languages (English, Spanish and French) helps me delve into the culture and mindset.  But there are some things I never really “get” when I am abroad.

Take my recent trip to Morocco.  Lovely country. Stunning landscape.  Beautiful labyrinthine old walled cities (“Medinas”), home to mile after mile of colorful scent-laden souks and open market stands displaying gorgeous hand-crafted silverware, carpets, foods, spices, exotic dresses, handmade crafts, and zillions of other cool stuff. Gorgeous!

But as a humble Central New York injury lawyer, there was something more compelling that drew my attention — indeed my extreme caution:  Motorcycles.  They drove through the narrow crowded streets brushing by people and stalls as if they were slalom ski gates.  I was afraid that if my wife or I took just one small step left or right while admiring the goods in the stalls, a motorcycle from behind would bowl us down.  And, according to my Marrakesh taxi driver, that’s not an infrequent occurrence.  Marrakesh’s Medina produces on average 10 motorcycle-on-pedestrian collisions a day!

I have blogged about the new driver-less automated cars before, and how they will dramatically reduce car crashes and fatalities. This future is not far off. The first true self-driving vehicles are expected before the end of the decade. A fleet surpassing 50% of all vehicles on the road could be here within 20 years.

We will be much better off with them for sure! But what I never really considered – until I read a recent article – was the profound effect driver-less cars will have on our economy. That’s what I’ll consider in this blog post.

To recap about driver-less cars, human driven cars will soon be going the way of the horse and buggy. An automated self-driving fleet of vehicles will almost certainly replace the current human-driven one within the next 25 years. The new fleet will have many advantages over the present one, but one of the most notable is that they will hardly ever crash. A study by the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) predicts that a self-driving fleet could eliminate 93 percent of crashes attributed to human error. This means, among other things, that we will be able to drink ourselves senseless without worrying about criminal penalties of “driving” drunk.