D’oh! Too early in the morning. I need more coffee. This part of the previous post should have read this way:
How do you think he may have done weaving through the cones while eating a cheeseburger? I know I tend to glance at my food before taking a bite.
How do you think he may have done if asked to tune the radio?
So do SCCA drivers, Le Mans, drivers, and a score of other racing classes. But note that a driver will not call or listen when he’s entering a braking zone or setting up for a turn. They wait until they are on a straight and the workload is reduced before attempting to communicate with pit crews or spotters. They understand the amount of processing required by communication.
As mentioned, they only talk when the workload allows. Usually on a straight, or a set of unchallenging curves. BTW, NASCAR isn’t as good an example as road racing, where you have shorter straights and more curves.
When you face distractions while driving, whether a burger, phone, passenger, or whatever, the best thing to do is get in (or stay in) the right lane, and be crank up your awareness a couple of notches.
I’m not saying that people should be banned from these activities. Only that people should be aware of the potential hazards they create for themselves and other drivers when your awareness is curled up in the back seat, snoring happily.
BTW, I don’t see you as a troll. You feel passionate about the subject; so do I. That’s what these boards are here for, right?
I refer you guys to my earlier post. One needs to be aware of how distractions …um… distract you. One also needs to be able to prioritize processes. Neither of these things, although crucial to driving these days, was ever taught to me. I had to figure them out on my own. With the prevalance of simulation training, I think that it is at least worth a look into devloping a software that could train drivers to prioritize their actions.
Differences among the various distractions have already been pointed out to you, CPU. The don’t fit the conclusion you want to reach, so you ignore them. For the benefit of other Dopers reading this thread, I will mention one more. More of my defensive driving maneuvers in pedals involve drivers on cell phones than any other issue. (And almost none of those drivers seem to have any awareness they’re impaired.) Moreover, almost none of the other maneuvers involve burgers, radios or (as far as I can tell) conversations with passengers. Rather, they’re mostly simple failure to see me (happens without the cell phone too, just not nearly so often), failure to use a turn signal, aggressively trying to “squirt” into traffic and simple daydreaming.
Like Tenspace, I don’t think you’re a troll. But you have made clear the only way to dissuade you from this behavior is to make it illegal. Unfortunately, that may take time. In the meanwhile, hopefully other folks who use cell phones while driving will seriously reconsider the practice.
You can’t legislate good driving habits. Others have tried to justify their own poor behavior behind the wheel by dismissing it as not nearly as distracting. I don’t buy it. You are either concerned about the other drivers around you or you aren’t.
I rode my bicycle from the age of 6 to the age of 18 nearly everywhere I went. I suffered through many instances of not being seen. On one occasion, I literally had to kick the car to get the drivers attention as it forced my tires up against the curb while my pedal scraped the side of the car. Of course, back then, we didn’t have cell phones as the catch-all scapegoat. I just attributed the problem to poor driving skills.
I drive on freeways in the Bay Area, and I make it a point to try to find the cause of erratic driving, which I see way too much of.
I have seen:
Lots of cellphone use
Women putting on makeup
Men reading books
Men reading magazines
People eating. (I agree with cellphoneuser that this is distracting - at least for some foods. My solution is to not do either.
Some people just being jerks.
I can’t tell if people are listening to the radio. I’ve seen maybe one case where talking to a passenger could be considered the cause of erratic driving.
Cellphone use is not all that prevalent. The percentage of erratic drivers using cellphones is far greater than the percentage of all drivers using cellphones.
I’ve never seen anyone be erratic while dialing, but I wouldn’t, since they’d be done with it before I could tell.
A reliable indicator of cellphone use, I’ve found, is long following distances in heavy and slow traffic (which adds to congestion and encourages lane changing) and varying following distances.
I’m not saying, by the way, that all bad driving is cellphone or distraction related. The multple lane changers don’t appear to be cellphoners, best as I can tell.
Of course we can legislate good driving habits. Wearing seat belts was always prudent. It took seat belt laws to get people to do it. Similarly, you’ve made it clear that only legislation will pry that precious cell phone out your ear. As for your latest argument, it’s a faulty syllogism. Accidents are caused by bad drivers, therefore your cell phone use is harmless? Except, no one said cell phones cause all accidents. No one even asserted they cause most accidents. What Cecil’s column said, supported by studies, common sense and anecdotal evidence, is that cell phone use while driving is a significant risk. And the problem is only going to get worse, as BlueTooth and other hands-free technologies make cell phone use while driving more common.
And bear in mind (talking to the other Dopers here) that it’s not just that a cell phone increases the risk of your making mistake. It also impairs your ability to respond to mistakes by others. That’s what happened to the friend I mentioned yesterday. The accident was the other fellow’s fault (ran a stop sign at what he erroneously thought was a four-way stop), but my friend acknowledges that, had she not been on the phone, she’d have seen him and probably would have been able to avoid the collision.
No. Seatbelt use is not a good driving habit. It’s a personal safety habit. Fastening your seatbelt doesn’t make you drive better or protect others, it protects you. Although I wear my seatbelt, (I have always worn it) I don’t believe we need laws to force others to do so.
As for “significant risk”, I contend that there is risk involved in all non-driving related tasks, and it’s ridiculous to single one out.
There are ALREADY laws in place to deal with reckless driving. If your driving ability is observably compromised by ANY of the examples I have given, you should be pulled over and ticketed. However, presuming that someone is driving recklessly, and ticketing them because they happen to be talking on a cell phone is wrong.
This is incorrect. The seatbelt holds you in the seat during maneuvering. They originated in airplanes for that reason . If you’re not wearing a seatbelt, you use the steering wheel as a grabhandle, which further reduces your ability to control the vehicle. Remember, a light touch on the wheel is all that’s needed.
I agree with you. They should be ticketed for reckless driving; there’s no presumption if the officer witnessed the recklessness, whether from a cellphone or too many beers. The point is not “why” the ticket is written; the point is that using a cell phone reduces a driver’s ability to maintain awareness of their surroundings.
Passionate about what - your right to continue with behaviour that is considered by most experts and confirmed by tests to be unsafe, because there are other unsafe acts that other people may have commited.
Do you think the need to legislate against the activity may come about because a small minority feel that their skills are not impaired by phone use, just like the minority who, prior to random breath tests, used to swear blind, “I drive better after a few drinks.”
Any idiot knows that it is unsafe to eat a cheeseburger or apply makeup or read a book while driving, even the people doing it. It used to be a contentious point in Australia that people are booked for eating while driving but smokers get away with smoking.
I don’t know if you are a troll but I have to confess I find it baffling that you think that your position has any merit at all. Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who confesses to being this responsible on the road:
I eat while driving once or twice a week. I use my cell phone while driving 10 to 20 times per week.
From YOUR post I must assume that you NEVER engage in distracting behavior behind the wheel. Wow! Can I have your autograph?
Thanks for the feedback and opinions everybody. I think this horse is dead.
Unfortunately, Cecil seems to have looked at a number of the same articles that most of the press do, without researching the commentary that occurred AFTER the articles were released.
The Redelmeier & Tibisharani article from the New England Journal of Medicine was beaten to death in the months after its release for an incredible number of methodological mistakes—so many that the authors themselves basically have retracted the majority of their conclusions in subsequent articles. Problems with their study included the fact that they forgot the fact that while cell phone records do accurately reflect the time of the call, there is no such confirmation for the times of the accidents themselves. Based on their results, a cell phone call within five minutes of the time of an accident was counted as being a cell phone related accident. Don’t know about anyone else, but if I personally have an automobile accident, I AM going to be on the cell phone within 5 minutes talking to either the cops, my insurance company, or my wife. These calls have absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s propensity for getting into an accident in the first place. Further, since the average cell phone call lasts for approximately 2 minutes, their results indicated that the cell phone “distraction” effect apparently lasted for 3 minutes AFTER the conclusion of the call, which is unplausible to say the least.
The University of Utah study cited basically states that your average reduction in reaction time is on the order of .08 seconds, or roughly the distance that a car at highway speeds takes to travel a whopping 7 feet. Since another result of being on the phone is a decrease in speed and an increase in following distance (both cited in the same article), the net affect in the event of an accident is an increase in collision speed of 2 feet per second (about 1/3 the traveling speed of the averge walker). I do automotive accident reconstruction, and we’ve modeled it based on the data in the article.
Further, most cell phone research studies stack the deck rather drastically. They put the subjects into an experimental paradigm where they are aware that their performance is being monitored and ask them to drive with their full attention on the roadway. If this condition occurs in normal driving for anyone who has had their license for more than a year or so, it would frankly amaze me—most of us are attending to the driving task while thinking about something other than JUST the driving itself. The cell phone condition, on the other hand, involves an individual multitasking by definition. There is almost always SOME reduction in performance when performing two tasks when compared to one. The “deck stacking” in these studies lies in the underlying assumption that a driver NOT on a cell phone is devoting their ENTIRE attention to the driving task, something not supported by any studies of driver behavior.
When the studies involve a driver having a conversation with a passenger versus a driver having a cell phone conversation, the the results are not usually statistically significant. At that, what an experimenter means by “significant” is not what the general public means by the same term. “Significant” in terms of experimental results means “reliable”, not “substantial”. If research showed that citizens of Los Angeles averaged 1/16 of an inch taller than those of New York, it might be “significant” (i.e., “reliable”), but would hardly be substantial in terms of anything that might make a difference in the way clothing was made.
It is true that cell phone users scan a smaller area to the sides when driving than those not on cell phones, but the same is true for any other task involving substantial mental resources while driving, such as dealing with passengers, eating, drinking, or anything else. The practical effects are just about nil. For some good studies on the same topic, go onto Google and check out the research of Recarte and Nunes, or the study done by the University of North Carolina for AAA a couple of years ago. The Harvard Center for Public Policy also has a good one from the same time frame. Heck, you may be able to dig up some of the ones that I’ve written for IEEE, Professional Safety, or a couple of other technical journals.
In short, the answer is that cell phone use is a distraction while driving, but the jury is still out whether the amount of distraction is significantly different from that of many other “acceptable” activities. On most lists, it ranks about #10, with stuff outside the car being drastically the leading cause (signs, pedestrians, etc.)
Actually, the experimental evidence suggests that the net effect of forcing someone that does not want to wear a seatbelt to use one is a net increase in their driving speed of approximately 10 miles per hour. I can dig up the article title if anyone is interested.
Fact of the matter is that trying to increase “safety” by legislation or obvious engineering changes rarely works nearly as well as its proponents would have one belive due to a phenomenon know as “risk homeostasis”. This is the tendency for individuals to have an “acceptable” level of risk for a familiar task, and if that risk is artificially lowered, to increase their risk taking behavior a commensurate amount to return to their “comfortable” level (assuming that their is some “benefit” to doing so).
A study done at a cab company in Germany (Hamburg, I think) involved 700 cars equipped with and 700 without antilock brakes to see which resulted in fewer accidents (the assumption was that ABS would lower the accident rate). In fact, it raise the rate of accidents, though not to a statistically significant level. When the underlying data was analyzed, it was found that drivers with ABS-equipped cars tended to follow closer, brake later, take turns faster, etc (all significant effects). The underlying assumption on the part of the driver was that ABS brakes stopped the car faster, so they were equally safe in spite of such behaviors.
Further, in the case of cell phones, based on the studies, one can equally easily argue that cell phones actually may DECREASE distraction. Which do you think would ultimately be more distracting if you got a mile away from home and suddenly didn’t remember whether you had closed the garage door: a) making a 10 second call to ask your neighbor, or b) trying to remember whether you did it or not for the remaining 30 minutes of your morning commute?
As of about 5 years ago, when I was the technical lead for driver interface development, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that approximately 125,000 accidents annually were caused by handheld cell phone use while driving. That same year, they estimated that monkeying with the radios in cars resulted in 150,000 accidents annually.
A study conducted in the DC area (I believe by Westat, but possibly by the VPI Transportion Research Institute) concluded that roughly 3% of all drivers were using their cell phones at any given time, based on observations of drivers at a number of locations in that area. That percentage would, I expect, be far higher than the number that were playing with their radio controls at any given time. This would tend to support the conclusion that the radio controls in your cars are far more distracting than cell phones on average.
If you check back to the 30’s when car radios were first introduced, you would find similar debates and public outcry with regard to the impending carnage that would occur on American roadways as drivers became so engrossed in radio programs that they totally lost track of the paths of their vehicles. Not saying it doesn’t occur, but there doesn’t seem to be a “Ban the Radio” movement going on anywhere that I have seen.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time at the moment to dig up cites, but your arguments, DD, not only contradict my understanding on a number of points but defy common sense. Seat belts increase risk? Balderdash. Seat belt laws are widely regarded as having been the most important of three factors which contributed to a significant decline in traffic fatalities since the mid 80s (the other two being air bags and more aggressive enforcement of DUI laws). But, you saw a study once consistent with your agenda, so that becomes true and all the rest becomes false. That’s disingenuous policy analysis.
Likewise with cell phones. Sure, the studies can be picked apart. All studies can be picked apart. As mentioned previously, the tobacco industry played that game for decades. We do the best we can with what we have. And bear in mind that the main reason we don’t have a good study is that the American cell phone companies refuse to cooperate. Meanwhile, I know it’s a significant hazard because I have to dodge it several times every day. That’s anecdotal, of course, but it’s an observation built up over several years and I have no agenda aside from not getting hit. My observation, as stated previously, is that, on average, it takes three times as long for someone on a cell phone to notice me on my bicycle and twice as long for them to figure out what they’re supposed to do not to hit me, even though I’m usually gesturing at them to proceed. This isn’t a little problem. I find myself having to make more defensive maneuvers to avoid cell phone drivers than any other single problem. None of this fits your agenda, so of course none of it is true.
BTW, if radios are more dangerous than cell phones - a proposition I find highly implausible - the right answer is to ban both, not to allow both.
I am a cell phone user. I use it while driving.
With that said I have a bit of personal anecdotal evidence to spread.
A) I am a worse driver while on the phone, though limited to swerving into the breakdown lane, usually when dialing because that is when my eyes leave the road 
B) I have never been in an accident and have had only about 5 TRUE close calls that were my fault. Two of them I was on a phone (trust me I remember my near misses).
I always use my signal. ALWAYS. Even before I got my hand’s free set. I always look before I change lanes. ALWAYS. I also keep my eyes on the horizon scanning all traffic constantly. A lot of the people I see who don’t use signals and sit slow in a lane or generally be disruptive on highways, ARE using cellphones though.
Where in lies the difference then? Concern for what you are doing. It was said earlier but honestly the biggest problem is that it gives people who already don’t care much about how they drive another distraction. People who’s number one priority is the road when in a car, already do hang up when they can’t hold the conversation anymore (do it to my wife all the time). People who’s number one priority is the road, continue to signal, and put more concentration towards the road.
I think a big problem is that a lot of people don’t have safe driving practices normally. A lot of people don’t scan the road ahead, don’t check their mirrors, and don’t signal. Those people tend to survive their trips by the skin on their teeth (whether the realize it or not). Put a cell phone with them and their disregard is worse. People who have safe driving practices ingrained in them, don’t lose them while talking on the phone. They can drown out the person talking to them like the radio or any number of other distractions as need be.
In reality, I think hands-free sets might be worse, I mean how many people are fumbling to attach it to their ear when they get a call mid trip? I think we need to be stricter on new drivers, harder driving tests, and stricter re-training. A lot of the people on the road don’t know how to drive in the first place, that is more the problem then cell phone use, cell phones are just a catalyst to some, not a cause of all.
I know I said good-bye, but PBEAR42 and his (her) faulty logic sucked me right back in.
You completely disregard (or don’t mention) the fact that cars are being designed to protect the occupants. They are now designed to crumple to absorb impact, and keep the passenger compartment intact.
You also fail to mention advances in life-saving techniques and improved response time for accident victims. These things play a much greater role than people with agendas (seatbelt legislation agendas, sobriety checkpoint agendas, etc…) would lead you to believe.
As far as your anecdotal evidence is concerned, it’s just that and nothing more. I have some anecdotal evidence too. I haven’t had an accident while talking on the phone and I don’t know anyone who has had an accident while talking on the phone. But none of this fits your (cell phone) agenda, so of course none of it is true.