Drivers on cell phones kill thousands
By Gareth Powell
Cell phone distraction cause at the miniumn 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
‘If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone,’ said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. ‘It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.’
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. ‘That frustrates everyone.’
“Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to get back into the normal flow of traffic,” David Strayer said. “The net result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic.”
The scientists also found previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.
Separate research last year at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supported the conclusion that hands-free cell phone use causes driver distraction.
The latest study used high-tech simulators. It included people aged 18 to 25 and another group aged 65 to 74. The simulations uncovered a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions by drivers using cell phones.
Telephone numbers presented by automated voice systems compete for drivers’ attention to a far greater extent than when the driver sees the same information presented on a display.
Interruptions to driving, such as answering a call, are likely to be more dangerous if they occur during maneuvers like merging to exit a freeway.
Things could get worse. Wireless Internet, speech recognition systems and e-mail could all be even more distracting.
Several readers wrote to LiveScience questioning whether cell phones were really so bad for drivers.
Here is some additional information that helps illuminate the death statistic.
The estimates of annual deaths reported may well be very low.
The number, for U.S. deaths related to drivers using cell phones, comes from a 2002 study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA). Researchers then estimated that the use of cell phones by drivers caused approximately 2,600 deaths.
Because data on cell phone use by motorists are limited, the range of uncertainty is wide, those researchers said. The estimate of fatalities in that HCRA report ranged between 800 and 8,000.
Importantly, the researchers noted (in 2002) that increasing cell phone use could be expected to cause the annual death estimate to rise. The 2002 estimate, for example, was up from an estimate of 1,000 deaths in the year 2000. Logic suggests the number — though just an estimate — could be much higher in 2008.
In 2001 in California, for example, ‘at least 4,699 reported accidents were blamed on drivers using cell phones, and those crashes killed 31 people and injured 2,786,’ according to an analysis by The Los Angeles Times.
That number can expected to be low, because of the lack of formal procedures for noting cell phone use as a cause of a traffic accident.
The Times also noted a 1997 study of Canadian drivers ‘who agreed to have their cell phone records scrutinized found that the risk of an accident was four times greater while a driver was using the phone.’
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