There is a difference between handsfree talking and carrying on a conversation with a passenger. A passenger in the car with you can see the current situation on the road, and the conversation will pause or adjust to suit it. This generally happens without conscious thought. If you ever have occasion to observe the conversation of two front seat occupants from the back seat, you’ll notice that it will usually be a labored and discontinuous affair (from an outside POV). Even if the people doing the talking think it’s flowing naturally, it’s actually riding the waves of traffic patterns.
The person on the other end of the phone, however, has no ability to judge your situation, and will generally try to carry on a more natural conversation. This forces the driver to remain engaged, and therfore distracted.
I’m not saying that talking with your passenger isn’t diverting attention. But it isn’t the same thing as a phone conversation, either.
Left Hand of Dorkness, I was struck (heh!) by the same thing you were in the article. I don’t care if there were multiple drivers or not. That’s 7-1/2 “near crashes” and 83 “other close calls” per vehicle per year in addition to almost 3/4 of the cars actually having crashes. We’re talking about almost two incidents per week. What did they do, require each driver to use a cellphone, eat a Big Mac, drink a beer, and put on eyeshadow at all times while two toddlers squabbled in the back seat and the passenger stripped in the front seat?
Interesting. The big title at the top of the page is, “Sailor Jim’s Blies: Ta Bhell with calling this a Blog, let’s call a Bspade a Bspade!” At the bottom of the page, it says, “This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Fiction” (emphasis mine).
Somehow, that doesn’t encourage me to believe the story.
My $0.02. I ride a bicycle everywhere (don’t have a car). Staying alive in pedals depends, more than anything, on knowing when people don’t see me. What I have found is that people talking on a cell phone take, on average, three times as long to see me as people who aren’t. Hands-free v. handheld makes a little difference (there’s something to SpriteRacer’s second point about tunnel vision), but not very much. And, once they register that I’m there, they take about twice as long to process how to preceed without having a collision (even though I’m usually gestering for them to go ahead) (as Sancho Panza says in Man of La Mancha, whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to go badly for the pitcher).
This is the study. Turns out that “75 percent of the single vehicle crashes were low-g force physical contacts or tire strikes; in other words, most of the crashes involved very minor physical contact.” If I understand what that’s saying, if my tires bump up against the parking barrier in a parking lot, that counts as a crash.
That’s much more understandable than thinking that 70% of their drivers were smashing into other cars, which is what I’d imagined.
Oops, I see one thing I’m misunderstanding–for all I know it was just one car that was involved in all sixty nine observed crashes.
Still… say it was as many as ten of the cars which were doing the crashing. They would each, on average, have had to be involved in about seven crashes over the year!
Out of a hundred cars, it seems more likely to me that only about five would be involved in a crash over a year. But that would mean each on average would be involved in about thirteen crashes in that year!
So… If I increase the number of individual cars involved in crashes to something sensible, I get a crazy number of crashes per each of those cars. If I reduce the number of crashes per car to something sensible, I get a crazy number of cars involved in crashes.
Something ain’t right here.
Think of it… if its true that just a few are involved in crashes, but that those few are involved in a lot of crashes, then shouldn’t we be doing something about those people’s licenses?
But surely I’m doing something wrong. Surely these numbers aren’t right.
His wife was concerned that he was putting identifiable details into his stories. He therefore decided to label them all fiction, kind of as a disclaimer. However, I’ve known the gentleman for quite a few years, and while he might “polish” details, he’s pretty straightforward about actual situations when they occur.
He’s particularly fanatic about traffic, driving, and the stupid things people do in those situations, so I’m inclined to believe the essence of the story, if not the details.
The problem here, and with Cecil’s cites, is that you can’t compute the relative risk of the various distractions without knowing the denominators. In other words, you can do all the controlled studies you want, but if you don’t count the number of times a driver used a cell phone, talked to a passenger, ate a burger, applied eyeliner – and didn’t have a crash, then you have no idea which distractions are more dangerous.
While I will admit to some anecdotal evidence, for instance, that a passenger conversing with a driver will modulate their conversation to accommodate to driving conditions, we have no scientific evidence that conversing is less distracting in person than on the phone.
Based only on the information in Cecil’s column and the link so generously provided by Left Hand of Dorkness, I think Cecil needs to 'splain how any of these studies computed relative risk or admit we just don’t know.
The Australian study seems to have no computation of relative risk. It also seems to suffer from imprecision. Was the driver on the phone at the moment of the accident or not??? Clearly, using phone records is a little imprecise, because the exact second of the accident may not be known, and I don’t know how they accounted for that.
The Virginia Tech study even admits the problem. On page 7 of the article, it says, “… an analysis of frequency of device use is currently being conducted for a future report that will allow calculations of event rates to determine estimates of the relative risk associated with these tasks” (emphasis added). Of course, to do it right, they have to compute the frequency of all the other distractions and their relative risks as well. Maybe much of the time, drivers were driving alone or were not talking to their passenger, and maybe they were using cell phones a lot. So the difference could be due entirely to the difference in the rate of occurrence of the distractions.
The other studies cited don’t seem to address relative risk at all. They just support the idea that cell phone use is distracting.
C’mon, Cecil! Please either explain that the studies took all this into account, or admit that it’s some pretty sloppy thinking. (And please, let it be the former…)
I don’t believe that cell phone use is any more dangerous than eating, smoking, putting on make-up, or any of the other distracting things we engage in while driving.
Cecil used statistical evidence to show a cause-effect relationship to cell phone use and accidents; “One study of 456 accidents in Australia requiring a hospital visit (McEvoy et al, BMJ, 2005) found that in nine percent of cases (40 crashes) the driver had been talking on a cell phone during the ten minutes prior to the accident, based on phone records.” I say, “So What?” How many drivers had the radio on when they crashed? Many more than were talking on their cell phones, I’m sure. Does this show that listening to the radio is dangerous, or just that the radio happened to be on when the accident occurred?
Cell phone use is rampant on our highways and byways. The fact that someone has an accident while conversing may often be coincidental rather than being a contributing factor.
I eat while driving once or twice a week. I use my cell phone while driving 10 to 20 times per week. Am I more likely to be involved in an accident while eating or while talking on the phone?
Has anyone studied reaction times of those who are partaking of a Big Mac, applying eye-liner, or yelling at the kids and compared those to reaction times of cell phone users?
I believe this is all a bunch of crap. Is cell phone use distracting? Yes, a little. Is it worse than any of the other examples I cited above? I don’t think so.
So we’ve got 241 drivers in 100 cars, and each car doing an average of 20,000 miles. That’s a lot of time on the road… But we end up with 69 people (or fewer) out of 241 having bumps and accidents. Sounds realistic.
As I alluded to in my earlier post, cell phone use while driving is probably right up there with listening to the radio, (or at least very common, nowadays) so I have a question. If cell phone use is “worse than driving drunk” have we seen an increase in accidents that can’t simply be attributed to the added congestion on the road? In other words, where are the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of additional accidents that are being caused by cell phone users?
Ah, the sceptics. Reminds me of global warming. Adapting behavior would be inconvenient, so pick away at the science. Tobacco industry played that game for decades. Gold-plated studies are rare. We have to make decisions without them. Here’s a little experiment you can do at home. Try riding as a passenger while someone else talks on a cell phone. I’ve yet to ride with someone whose performance wasn’t impaired, though the degree of course varies. If it’s true of 'most everyone else, it’s true of you too.
Here is a fairly comprhensive article on the subject. While data is still fairly scarce, mainly due to the fairly recent expansion of cell phone use, I found the Academic Studies and Public Opinion surveys to be very interesting. These can be found by scrolling down about a third of the site. http://www.ncsl.org/programs/transportation/cellphoneupdate05.htm
I’ve noticed that driving while on the phone is more like trying to have an in-person conversation with someone with accented English. The words are there but you have to apply more brainpower to interprete them. Phones, and cell phones in particular, filter speech, cut or drop audio, have odd delay patterns and have lower audio level than conversation with someone in the car. This requires additional concentration, sometimes lots more.
Let me clarify a couple of things. First off, I am not a sceptic (whatever that is) or even a skeptic. Secondly, I never said that my driving ability isn’t diminished (somewhat) by talking on the phone. The “crap” part of my statement stems from my refusal to believe it is WORSE than driving drunk, or more distracting than eating a greasy, dripping, hamburger, or correcting your children.
Singling out and legislatively targeting cell phone use as the root of all distracted driving is silly and if you can’t see that, then you’re beyond hope.
Cell phone usage while driving is worse than eating a dripping burger. Why? Because when you are talking on the phone, your mind is envisioning things related to the caller, or the subject being talked about. Eating a burger is a mechanical action and doesn’t cause your brain to wander off into another dimension. It certainly can be a dangerous thing when it drips and you react, but you’re still focusing on the traffic in general as opposed to what you’re doing when talking on the phone.
When you are on the phone you are TALKING. That’s all. Just conversing with another human being. This is something that we have been doing while driving since the automobile was invented. I don’t find it more distracting than any of those things I listed. Could you point me to the studies where reaction times were measured while driving and eating, conversing with someone in the car, correcting kids, putting on make-up, etc…?
Is cell phone use distracting? Again, YES! Does it require special legislation? NO!
If we ARE going to ban cell phone use while driving, we might want to ban nose-picking too. You know, sometimes those dried up ones just cling to the inside of your nostril no matter how hard you try to coax 'em out. That is a TOTAL distraction! And if you’re putting your finger up there too far, you’re impairing your vision. Not to mention the distraction this nasty habit causes to the drivers around you!
Mind you, how much hope is there for someone who seriously tries to justify their own use of a phone while driving by asserting that there are as many drivers talking on the phone as listening to the radio.
I know that I rarely drive any distance without spotting people talking on the phone but they are a very, very small minority of the number of drivers that I see.
Twice in the last 12 months Sydney police have conducted “blitzes” on phone use and each time have caught 400 - 500 drivers in a day.
I think the solution is simple. If it impairs driving to the same degree as drinking does simply make the penalties the same. It is easy to tell if a driver in an accident is drink impaired by breath testing. No driver is going to admit that they were on the phone. So make it like random breath testing - you get caught doing it, accident or not, and it’s bye bye licence. It would have the same effect that random breath testing did - most intelligent drivers would stop their anti-social high risk behaviour.
