Cellphone Dilemma: Hands-Free Doesn’t Help
Research blames conversation itself for distracting drivers.
We’ve all seen it: A car ahead or alongside wanders over the divider line, its driver obviously preoccupied or impaired – perhaps by drugs or drink. Then you get a look at the driver and the cause is apparent: He or she is on the phone.
There’s never been much doubt that cellphone use behind the wheel increases the potential for wrecking. But there has been a debate over whether hands-free devices would make it safer.
Apparently not.
Results of a new study indicate what a lot of us have believed for a long time: Not only does cellphone use behind the wheel cause accidents; using hands-free devices can make it worse.
That’s disappointing, but not surprising.
The study was done by a team from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Onboard cameras and internal sensors were used to track the actions of 100 car drivers for a full year.
They recorded driver distractions of various types. The leading cause of distractions? Wireless devices, primarily cellphones.
Some 700 cellphone-related incidents, which resulted in crashes or forced evasive action, were recorded. That’s an average of seven close calls – or worse – per driver. The second leading cause of such incidents was being distracted by passengers (400), followed by eating while driving (100).
Some states (New York and New Jersey, plus the District of Columbia) have banned use of hand-held devices behind the wheel, hoping that headsets and voice-activated phones would cut the distractions. It didn’t work for drivers in the study.
In fact, NHTSA researchers said using hands-free led to longer dialing times, extending the time the drivers were distracted. The bottom line, they said, is that whether drivers in the study had hand-held or hands-free devices, “phone use degraded both driving performance and vehicle control.”
The NHTSA findings aren’t a first. A 2003 University of Utah study found that drivers using either hand-held or hands-free devices were equally distracted. Researchers there concluded that cell-phone conversations create “inattention blindness,” during which drivers are oblivious to what is happening around them.
Translation: When you’re deep in conversation, the brain is inept at multi-tasking. That being true, what worse place to yak it up than behind the wheel?
The research didn’t involve truck drivers, but I’d bet its results don’t surprise them, based on what they see every day. And what about their own use of today’s on-board sophisticated communications systems?
Nothing short of banning cellphone use in moving vehicles would eliminate the dangers, but that’s not likely to happen. But for your own protection, you may want to consider giving your drivers some guidelines on when not to call.
Doug Condra
President
Email Doug Condra at dcondra@truckinginfo.com,
or write PO Bow W. Newport Beach, Calif. 92656.
