Crash Causation

 

 

Death By Cell Phone

By Eddie Wren

 

All contents copyright ©, Drive and Stay Alive, Inc., 2003 onwards, unless specified otherwise. All rights reserved.

IMPORTANT: click here to read the DISCLAIMER

 

  

Most people -- certainly business people -- would agree that cell phones have revolutionized our way of life by adding convenience, swift responses and an ability to continue working uninterrupted by travel time. But the sad fact -- despite the protests from all those who don't wish to have their new-found convenience limited -- is that cell phones, when used by drivers, have also revolutionized one of our ways of death, too. This is why some U.S. states, such as New York, have already made it illegal to use a hand-held cell phone while driving.

 

A study commissioned by a leading UK insurance company, Direct Line (2003), revealed that talking on any cell phone while driving is so mentally distracting that it is as dangerous as driving when slightly over the legal blood-alcohol limit. (In Britain, the BAC limit is 0.08%, the same as in the U.S.A.) Despite these results applying to hands-free phones as well as hand-held ones, Direct Line drew a line by suggesting that the findings should be used

A publicity image from the 'Think!'

road safety campaign in Britain.

to bring about a total ban on the use only of hand-held cell  phones while driving, but in purely safety terms that was a climb-down by a company that did not wish to aggravate potential clients by supporting an all-out ban.

 

By mid 2004, American bodies such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) were rightly starting to challenge the wisdom of approving the use even of hands-free cell phones while driving.

Direct Line commissioned their study from the world-renowned Transport Research Laboratory after a survey revealed that 40% of drivers in Britain (i.e. about 10 million motorists) use a cell phone while driving. Even though most of those drivers realized that using a cell phone is distracting, they did not think it to be as dangerous as drinking and driving. Direct Line commissioned the research in order to quantify the risks.

The study was carried out over three months, after which a panel of volunteers was tested on a sophisticated driving simulator. The level of driving impairment was tested for the three relevant driving situations:  talking on a hand-held cell phone, talking on a hands-free phone, and driving when slightly over the legal blood-alcohol limit. The result was that the drivers’ reaction times were thirty percent worse when they were talking on cell phones than when they were borderline intoxicated. Compared to normal driving conditions, drivers talking on the hand-held phone were fifty percent impaired. Two of the most visible problems that resulted from this impairment were an inability to maintain a constant speed and an inability to remain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead.

Drivers in the study later admitted that they had actually found it easier to drive while intoxicated (just over the legal limit) than when using a cell phone, whether it was hand-held or hands-free. Drivers using cell phones also missed many more road signs than did the drunk drivers. It should go without saying that hand-held cell phones proved to be even more distracting than hands-free units. Drivers using hand-held cell phones took about half a second longer to react than a driver under normal circumstances, and this was also longer than those who were mildly drunk. In real-life terms, this means for example that at 70 mph a driver on a cell phone would travel an extra 46 feet before even reacting to a danger on the road. And that, in many, many cases, has already proved to be the difference between life and death.

 

For those who are still skeptical about cell phones being dangerous when used by drivers, please click on Kimberly and Kathy Seager.

 

Subject Index

 

Relevant News Items

 

Esso/Exxon ban the use of mobile phones by their drivers world- wide

 

 

Related Topics

 

The cellular-news.com website has a page on which countries are listed which have cell phone bans for drivers: 

click here to view it

 

Relevant News Items

(Please note that this section is new, as at August 2004, and much information has yet to be added)

 

 

  March 8, 2005:  Year 2003 statistics from a Harvard study:

     Motorists using cell phones may have caused 2,600 deaths, 330,000 injuries and 1.5 million instances of property damage.

     Many people resent new laws that seem designed to protect them from themselves. Yet, doing something about the epidemic of motorists who use these devices would protect the vast majority of other people on the road.

Article: Motorists must keep eyes on the highway, from The Decatur Daily

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  December 28, 2004: A NHTSA Report that Appears to Sanction Certain Levels of Unnecessary Danger

     The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released a report that examines repeated experiences of cell phone use during simulated driving. According to the report, the harmful effects of conversing on the phone are very real initially, but may not be as severe with continued practice at the dual task, especially for young or middle-age drivers.

Read the report abstract, plus DSA comments, here.

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and  Sept. 20, 2004: A Speeding Swiss Driver Killed 2 French Police Officers While Sending an SMS

THONON-LES-BAINS, France (AFP) - A Swiss woman who drove her car into a French police van, killing two officers, while distracted by sending a mobile telephone text message was sentenced Monday to two and half years in prison by a court here.

     The judge found that Angela Shala, 33, was criminally negligent in causing the June 2003 accident, in which she was speeding at 170 kilometres (105 miles) per hour while tapping away on her mobile in a panicked effort to locate a friend's car she had been following. 

     Two other police officers were injured when Shala's car slammed into their vehicle on an Alpine motorway, causing it to crash and roll over twice.

     The Swiss woman was also fined EUR 1,500 (USD 1,800) and banned from driving for five years.

[Source: AFP, via Expatica]

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Drive and Stay Alive is posting the following abstract because it clearly shows how scientific fact can be selectively edited in order to imply that an inherently risky activity is actually safe.

 

  August 2, 2004:  New Safety Study Shows 71% of Drivers Steer More Accurately When Using a

Headset With Their Mobile Phones

     A new study that measured the physical impairment drivers experienced while using a mobile phone found that reaction time, accuracy and consistency of speed improved significantly when a headset was used with the phone. The study, commissioned by Plantronics, used a state-of-the-art driving simulator to compare the driving ability of subjects using a mobile phone under two conditions -- one holding a mobile phone, and the other using a headset, leaving their hands free.

     The Plantronics study is one of the first of its kind to analyze physical impairment experienced while driving and using a mobile phone; to date most other studies have focused solely on the mental distraction of using a mobile phone while driving....

     "The central question of our study was, 'For a person using a mobile phone, does driving improve if he or she uses a headset?' What the research showed is that, across all conditions, the answer is a resounding yes," said Stephen Wilcox, Ph.D., Principal of Design Science. "Driving with both hands on the wheel is the safest option for motorists who use mobile phones, and headsets are tools to enable that improvement."

     The driving performance of 24 subjects in three major categories was measured: steering accuracy, braking reaction time and speed variability. Key initial findings of the research found:
  --  71% of the test subjects steered more accurately when using a headset
  --  100% of the test subjects had faster brake reaction times when using a
      headset
  --  92% of the test subjects maintained a more consistent speed when using
      a headset  [more]


 DSA Comment: 

To be fair, Plantronics have stated a key point, albeit in a selective context: 'Driving with both hands on the wheel is the safest option...' And we certainly go along with this, because drivers should keep both hands correctly positioned on the steering wheel at all times except when using another, necessary driving control.

 

But Plantronics make two further comments which do not go together well:

     -- '...most other studies have focused solely on the mental distraction of using a mobile phone while driving...'

     -- 'For a person using a mobile phone, does driving improve if he or she uses a headset?'

 

The first of these comments alludes, among others, to research done by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in England, which has been among world leaders in driver safety research for over seventy years. The TRL found that driving while using a mobile phone -- irrespective of whether it is hand-held or hands-free -- gives drivers a mental impairment equivalent to driving with a blood-alcohol concentration, or BAC, of 0.08% (i.e. the maximum legal limit for drunk driving in 21 of 82 known countries, while 60 of the remaining countries have a limit lower than 0.08, so doesn't this speak volumes?).

 

To use Plantronics' chosen phrase, the 'mental distraction' of driving while using any cell phone is considerable, so at Drive and Stay Alive we fail to see a sensible point in the research they have undertaken. It is rather like a drunk driver arguing in court that he only had 0.08% blood-alcohol rather than, say, 0.16%. The key issue is that any person driving with a 0.08 BAC, just like anyone driving while using a cell phone, is still dangerous.

Eddie Wren, Executive Director.

 

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  June 23, 2003:  Final Call for Drivers Using Hand-Held Mobile Phones in Britain

     Driving while using a hand-held mobile phone will soon be a specific offence, Road Safety Minister David Jamieson announced today.

     The new offence will take effect from 1 December 2003. Initially offenders will be subject to a £30 fine, which can be increased to a maximum fine of £1000 if the matter goes to court. The Government is planning to legislate to make it an endorseable offence, so that drivers will get three points on their licence each time they are caught holding a phone.

Full press release here.

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  Feb. 1, 2002: an accident happened on the Capital Beltway outside Washington. It killed five people including a

 20-year-old girl who had just that day purchased the SUV she was driving, and who made or received 15 calls on her mobile phone in the four hours before the crash. Read the full article, from Reuters, on the WBUR webpage.