Well - I don’t know what happens over there, but here in the UK it is standard procedure after an accident to breathalyse the drivers and check their mobile phones.
I thought vocab guidelines mandated they be called “collisions”, since “accident” implies there’s no-one to blame.
I just spent yesterday at traffic school (in order to get a speeding ticket expunged from my record), and the instructor made certain that everyone in the class understood that distinction.
Wow, that’s nifty! Considering that cops use radio mikes while driving (often at high speed) it would make for an interesting court case.
I’ll let you in on the most open secret regarding this. It isn’t lobbying by the industrial-cellphone complex that prevents such laws, it’s because we as a society have merely decided to accept the risk. We’ve kidded ourselves with the whole hands-free ‘fix’ but as mentioned that’s not the real problem. For some people communicating while driving ***is ***an extremely efficient use of their time, but for most of us we just do it because we can. The act of simply driving a car itself is much more dangerous than the vast majority of people realize and causes more deaths than most anything else in the modern world. But not enough that the benefits of individual automobile transportation don’t still far outweigh that danger, at least on a personal level. And cellphone use just merges right into that…
In the UK from 2013, at least, the people that do that (police, emergency vehicle drivers etc) undergo specific training to do so, and have to pass a rigorous test. I know a police officer who (a few years ago now) at one stage was trying to qualify to drive rapid response/pursuit vehicles. They had to provide detailed running commentary throughout the sessions, and their assessments/observations had to match that of the observer in with them. But all their communications were about what they were involved in (traffic, hazards, suspect) - they were not talking about dinner or clothes or resolving domestic issues.
The problem with communicating at a social level is that we try to place ourselves into the situation that the other party is in to understand them - when driving, this means that a part of our brain is trying to be where the other party to the conversation is. Also, two people in a vehicle (with access to the same information about traffic conditions) pace their conversation depending on the circumstances, allowing the driver to switch focus to driving as needed. This does not happen when using a cellphone - the non-present party demands a response regardless of the drivers circumstance (although the magnitude of this effect is still debated, and some researcher claim that there is no difference in distraction levels between in-car and cell conversation - but that both are distracting). Even worse is listening to one side of a conversation that a passenger is having. Our brain assumes that we are the other party and we try to fill the converational blanks, reducing the cognitive processing available to handle driving.
Yeah, I totally agree. I should have said that I wouldn’t support such a claim by someone who used that radio mic/cellphone thingy, but I can just picture someone trying to and the ensuing media buzz surrounding it!
One of my very first ‘rant’ posts here (well over a decade ago!) was regarding talking on a cell while driving. Back then I didn’t see how it was any different than talking to someone in the car with you. But like you said, face-to-face communication is an incredibly and deeply hard-wired thing in humans, one of the single most important evolutionary developments leading to sentience. *Indirect *voice communication has only been around for about 150 years (i.e. the telephone then wireless) and we haven’t evolved to be able to correctly deal with it (and won’t for eons)…
I believe quite a few people who do suck like to drink, as well.
They just use straws.