HOME / human nature: Science, technology, and life.

Driving While InterrogatedHow to stop cell-phone use behind the wheel.

By William SaletanPosted Tuesday, July 21, 2009, at 11:09 AM ET

It's time to talk about how we can give up cell-phone use while driving.

Let's stop pretending that we aren't doing it, that we're doing it safely, or that it can be done safely. There's too much evidence that none of these things is true.

I won't bore you with every detail of the research to date. You can read some of it in "The Mind-BlackBerry Problem," published in Slate last fall. Better yet, read Myron Levin's terrific investigative articles in the Los Angles Times and Mother Jones. Levin reported that the researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had analyzed studies, added their own preliminary test findings, and prepared documents concluding that nonemergency use of cell phones at the wheel was killing too many people and should be stopped. Those documents, which the agency's chief of staff refused to release, were subsequently demanded by the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen under the Freedom of Information Act. Today they were posted by the New York Times.

One of the documents, an internal PowerPoint presentation, estimates that in 2002, cell-phone use contributed to more than 182,894 crashes and 1,248 deaths. The researchers' minimum calculation was 508 deaths; Levin reported an internal estimate of 955; a Harvard study put the number at 2,600. A draft letter to the nation's governors, prepared for then-Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta but supposedly never forwarded to him, warned:

RSS

NHTSA estimates that driver distraction contributes to about 25 percent of all traffic crashes. … A significant body of research worldwide indicates that both hand-held and hands-free cell phones increase the risk of a crash. Indeed, research has demonstrated that there is little, if any, difference between the use of hand-held and hands-free phones in contributing to the risk of driving while distracted. In either operational mode, we have found that the cognitive distraction is significant enough to degrade a driver's performance. We recommend that drivers not use these devices when driving, except in an emergency.

The same general conclusions and recommendations appear on NHTSA's Web site, though the agency doesn't make them easy to find. The URL is so long it won't even fit into a Microsoft Word hyperlink. (To get it, type "NHTSA Policy and FAQs on Cellular Phone Use While Driving" into a search engine.) The important lessons to take away from the research are these: First, cell-phone use while driving is a brain problem, not a hands problem. Even with hands-free use, phones suck your brain out of the physical world, fatally distracting you from the road. Second, the effect is as bad as driving drunk. Hands-free phone use can impair driving skills more than intoxication does.

We prohibit driving under the influence of alcohol. We should prohibit driving under the influence of cell phones, too. But giving up our phones is hard. How can we do it? How can we maintain what cell phones offer—mobile access—without endangering others?

Let's start with the wireless industry's recommendations. Its "Driving Tips" include these three rules: "Don't Text and Drive," "Place calls when you are not moving," and "Let the person you are speaking with know you are driving; if necessary suspend the call in heavy traffic or hazardous weather conditions."

The research compiled by NHTSA and others shows that conducting phone calls, not just placing them, is too dangerous at the wheel. So the second rule needs to be extended: Use the phone only when you aren't moving. The third rule needs to be similarly amended: Let the person you're speaking with know that you're in a car, that you may soon have to drive it, and that the call must then be suspended.

One of the draft documents NHTSA never released is a "Proposed Policy" that said

[D]rivers should do at least one of the following:
Stop the vehicle in a safe location that is off the road, well away from traffic, before they receive or place their calls.
Allow a passenger to receive or place calls.
Use the phone's voice mailbox feature if so equipped, and return the call when not driving.

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

I bike to work and am frequently threatened by drivers unable to notice me because they are talking or texting on their cell phones. I live in Washington State where driving while texting or using a hand-held cell phone is illegal, but not enforced. Users have learned that there is no penalty or enforcement and as such do not heed the law.

While I do not have a cell phone, I am aware that the newer ones have location abilities. If they have location abilities, they can calculate velocity. A federal law should be passed that forces companies to have phones and transmitters programmed to not accept or allow a call when the velocity of the phone exceeds a safe amount, say 5 - 10 mph (or a speed deemed not likely to cause harm). 911 could be made an exempt number. If this is hard to program, the programmers should get on it. It can't be impossible.

The first complaint I hear when I offer this opinion is that passengers will not be able to use their phones based on this rule. I must admit that this does not bother me, and am surprised that users are so concerned to have access at all times. The idea that cell phone users are entitled to text and call at anytime anywhere is an industry marketing ploy that has led us to the unsafe use of phones, including while driving. Instead users should accept that the price of safe streets and sidewalks is the limit of phoning in cars.

-- Impara
(To reply, click here)

I believe that one factor that could make it dangerous even to use a hands-free phone while driving is the quality of the signal, that is, the signal-to-noise ratio of the auditory signal. The human mind is very good at separating signal from noise, and does it even without us noticing unless conditions are particularly bad, but it takes a great deal of cognitive effort, or what psychologists call "attentional capacity".

In addition to the audio being filtered to the audio band and sometimes being quite noisy, along with traffic noise, two other features of phone conversations make things even worse: hands-free setups often are monaural, which eliminates helpful redundancy, and since it is an auditory-only channel, all kinds of cues, primarily visual, are missing; this eliminates still more useful redundancy.

Of course, people differ in terms of how much attentional capacity they have (this is negatively impacted by some obvious short-term factors such as fatigue and long-term ones like aging), so there will still be individual or time-dependent differences.

-- gshenaut
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES