Study Confirms Mobile Phones Distract Drivers 439
An anonymous reader notes a Reuters report of a study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, confirming that Mobile phone calls distract drivers far more than even the chattiest passenger, causing drivers to follow too closely and miss exits. California's ban on using a handheld cell phone while driving, which went into effect last summer, is looking less than fully effective. A handful of other states have instituted similar bans, but none has forbidden driving while talking on a cell phone at all. "Using a hands-free device does not make things better and the researchers believe they know why — passengers act as a second set of eyes, shutting up or sometimes even helping when they see the driver needs to make a maneuver."
talking on mobile as dangerous as drunk driving (Score:5, Informative)
There is a ton of supporting evidence that talking on your mobile while driving is dangerous. The legal situation has more to do with convention and historical artifacts than anything of substance.
In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving [wikipedia.org] experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")
The two hosts arranged an obstacle course into four parts: accelerating to 30mph and then stopping at a stop sign, parallel parking, seeing how long it would take to do 15mph through the whole course, and while going 30mph, being told to switch left, right or center lane. Each part was graded by an instructor.
During a sober run of the course, both test drivers passed. However, during the cell phone run, Hyneman asked the drivers three questions in which they had to either think about the answer, repeat a sentence, figure out a verbal puzzle and list five things. Both drivers failed the obstacle course.
Re:Cost of Convenience? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that's not true. When the limits were raised from 65 to 75, the accident rate dropped.
Re:Cost of Convenience? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/960439 [sae.org]
It costs money, though the brief is still useful.
Basically the leading cause of accidents would seem to be bad road design. Additionally most accidents happen on roads with lower-than-highway limits. Also, the German autobahns, with no speed limits, have consistently been safer than US low limit roads.
"Speed limits were found to have minimal effect on the traffic accidents. "
The causes weren't pulled from someone's butt (Score:2, Informative)
You describe "supposed" causes as if they were the result of some half-cooked speculation instead of solid experimental evidence like the TFA describes. There are laws against stuff that has a strong correlation with causing accidents. For example, drinking and driving. Are you suggesting that anti-DUI legislation also be done away with? Since talking on the phone has been shown to have similar risks as DUI, it should be treated the same way.