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Driving While Talking on Your Cell Phone Is Safe? (Probably Not)
No matter how many times scientists, the Mythbusters, the government or even we bloggers tell you that driving while talking on the phone is dangerous, you just don't listen. So, why isn't the road littered with the shells of burned-out cars and the bodies of drive-time chatterboxes? A new study from economists Saurabh Bhargava, at the University of Chicago, and Vikram Pathania, of the London School of Economics, suggests that, while gabbing on your cell seems dangerous in a laboratory setting, it doesn't translate to real-world disaster. The two researchers collected call data from a cell phone company, filtering for drivers' calls by looking for those that switched towers over an 11-day period in 2005. There should have been an increase in reported crashes during those spikes, and, yet, the researchers found none. They then expanded their research to cover more years and a wider area (the initial data being from California only), and still found no correlation between calls by drivers and reported accidents. The researchers have suggested that driving while talking on a cell phone may hinder some drivers, but may cause others to be more cautious.
Of course, the research is hardly definitive. There is no way for the researchers to identify the number of those drivers who were using hands-free devices, and there is an obvious correlation between downward trends in crashes and the increase of laws against talking on cell phones. Are the dangers of driving while on the phone overstated? Perhaps -- but we wouldn't consider this news as a license to drive around with your cell phone glued to your ear. Besides, it's still illegal.
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Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsadminJan 13th 2011 6:10PM
From what is being reported about this study, it has many holes and seems to be completely without merit. If you monitor accidents at a time of day when far less people are actually on the road, there will be a significant decrease in the margin of error. In other words, if I cross the yellow line or swerve to the right or to the left and there are no other vehicles to hit or vehicles to watch out for no accident will occur. Has it been reported who paid for this study?
dwl-sdcaJan 17th 2011 2:24AM
@admin raises interesting questions. Another issue is how the authors determined that the caller was not a passenger.
I have tried and tried but cannot find the full Bhargava/Pathania report anywhere. I have found several older, similar articles from them defending driving while calling. None of these seem to have been published in peer-reviewed journals. If anyone can post a link to the authors' recent paper, please do.