August 1, 2004
Talk, talk, drive, talk
According to The Chicago Tribune, whether it's safe or not to talk on a cell phone while driving, is dividing the nation.
"There are studies that suggest talking on a cell phone while driving is more distracting than interacting with someone in the car. Fellow passengers generally share the driver's sense of awareness of traffic conditions. Someone on the other end of a phone conversation has no idea what the driver is up against.
A 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that drivers talking on a cell phone (hand-held or hands-free) were four times more likely to have an accident than other motorists. That helped to prompt various state and local proposals to ban cell-phone use in the car or require that motorists use hands-free headsets. The movement for a ban hasn't exactly swept the nation, though.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that 25 to 30 percent of fatal crashes are the result of distractions of all kinds, such as eating, drinking, talking. But there is little or no research that isolates the risk of distraction because of cell phone usage.
To further complicate the issue, The Wall Street Journal reports that not-yet-published research by NHTSA suggests that hands-free headsets are no safer to use than hands-on phones. The headsets encourage drivers to talk more on their phones than if they had to juggle handheld units. The research also reveals that people using headsets tended to drive faster."
According to accident statistics reported by NHTSA, the number of people inured or killed in car crashed has dropped and the number of miles travalled increased, while the number of cell phones over that same time has greatly grown. NHTSA says that cell phone usage by motorists doubled from 2000 to 2002 and most likely doubled again from 2002 to 2004.
So, if driving while talking on cell phones constitutes a growing danger on the roads, why hasn't it shown up in the crash statistics? Maybe because local and state police investigating crashes have not consistently asked about cell phone usage. That's a good place to start to determine whether a danger exists and how large it is.
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