Proof: Driving with cell phone as bad as driving drunk, possibly even worse…
I hate drivers talking on cell phones. Usually, when I see someone do something stupid on the road I say to myself, “if you’d get off the f’n phone maybe you’d be able to merge without cutting people off, see the red light soon enough to stop, see the green light soon enough to go, drive in only one lane etc. etc.”
About 10% of the time, I’m wrong… the driver wasn’t on a phone afterall. The vast majority of the time, however, the bad, half dead to the world drivers are so caught up in a phone call of such importance that it couldn’t possibly wait and clearly must fully occupy the driver’s mind because their driving is stupid, unpredictable and dangerous.
Now there’s research that shows that driving with a cell phone is at least as bad as driving drunk and in many cases (like as the cause for accidents) even worse than driving drunk…
Driving with cell phone as bad as driving drunk, study says
By Tom Avril
The Philadelphia Inquirer
(MCT)
PHILADELPHIA – Drivers who talk on cell phones may be just as dangerous as those who drink.
That’s the sobering conclusion of a study published Thursday by University of Utah researchers who monitored 40 men and women on a driving simulator.
And drivers using hands-free phones were no better than those with the hand held variety, confirming previous studies.
The findings, published in the journal Human Factors, represent a direct blow at a popular pastime that is taken for granted by millions of multitasking drivers.
At any given moment during the day, 10 percent of drivers on U.S. roads are gabbing away on their wireless devices, according to a 2005 estimate by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Bad idea, said psychologist Frank A. Drews, one of the Utah study’s authors.
“It’s kind of almost unpredictable how they are driving,” Drews said.
When using cell phones, drivers had slower reaction times and more accidents, and they drove inconsistently, sometimes approaching other cars then falling back, he said.