Although I don't talk much on the telephone, anyway, whether it's a land line or a cell phone, I recently decided to avoid talking on my cell phone while driving. I have not only noticed how distracted I can be while driving and talking, but I've read of the terrible consequences of such distraction. Just today my husband and I were talking about this issue and how we're going to be more committed to watching the road and leaving our cell phones in our purses or backpacks while we're driving. Then this evening, I read the following article in Mother Jones online: "Do Cell Phones Kill 1,000 People a Year?," by Myron Levin, posted October 31, 2008.
This week I tutored a student who was writing a research essay on cell phone use. The student came across research that indicated one's impairment while talking on a cell phone and driving a car is worse than the impairment of someone driving under the influence. Researchers at the University of Utah:
tested 40 drivers in a simulator, monitoring responses to things like a car suddenly braking in front of them; the test subjects performed no better, and by some measures worse, while talking on a cell phone than they did with a blood alcohol level of .08 percent—legally drunk.
According to Levin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spent a lot of time in 2003 looking at such studies and realized that it had a duty to inform the public of the detrimental effects of driving while talking on cell phones, even hands-free ones. But the NHTSA backed down on making all the information truly public: numbers of deaths are not attached to any information on the organization's website, and an annotated bibliography of major research on the subject was removed and replaced with a less informative list of sources, according to Levin. And wireless companies spend millions of dollars lobbying.
Don't Talk and Drive. And Crashproof your kids.
1 comment:
It's against the law here to talk on the phone while driving.
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