It’s a warm Spring evening in downtown Toronto. You’re driving west along Bloor Street in your 2-month old Volvo station wagon. It’s a nice feeling driving this comfortable, tank-strong vehicle. You’re approaching Islington Avenue and the light turns yellow. There’s only one car between you and the intersection, and that guy sees that there’s a car hoping to make a left onto Islington. So he decides to be nice and not to run the yellow, letting the oncoming car make his left turn. You both hit the brakes, yours milliseconds after his. A second later there’s a loud crunching bang.
Your Volvo jerks forward, but your head is supported by the headrest, and the brakes keep you from chain colliding into the nice guy ahead of you. Congratulations, you’re now part of one of the approximately 36,000 accidents in the Greater Toroto Area this year. Lucky you, it’s just a fender-bender and you’re not hurt, but your new car is probably at least dented.
You get out of your Volvo. The guy behind you obviously didn’t stop in time and he ran into your rear end. He’s getting out of his car too, still holding his Nokia phone in his right hand, and presently says into it, “Something’s come up. I’ll have to call you back.” No kidding.
His car is an older, yellow Camaro IROC. Now that aggressive little ride is looking like a boxer with a broken nose. Meanwhile, your tank is barely scratched, thanks to Swedish engineering and Swedish steel. You might wonder whether him being on the phone was partly responsible for not stopping in time. You’d be right to wonder that.
The data
A paper that appeared in the prestigious ‘New England Journal of Medicine’ in 1997 analyzed data that concerned cell phone use and accidents. The data were gathered by two researchers at the University of Toronto. They compared phone records and accident reports to see if driving (in Toronto, in 1996) while talking on the phone was correlated with having an accident. It was. Being on the phone increased the odds of being in an accident about four-fold. The research was well designed; it compared drivers who had accidents to themselves driving while not on the phone. The four-fold increased risk was the same for older, younger, and experienced drivers alike.
The results of that study (1) looked solid, and a number of subsequent studies have supported its conclusions. Driving while on the phone is distracted driving. As a result of that research, most jurisdictions now have laws forbidding driving while holding a phone.
Driving while on the phone is just as dangerous as driving legally drunk
Another conclusion reached by the Toronto study, also confirmed by other studies, is that talking on the phone poses the same level of risk as driving with the legal limit of alcohol in your blood (in Toronto at the time, .08%). An investigation reported on the TV series ‘Mythbusters’ illustrates the risk in an amusing way. In it, two drivers complete a slightly complex, closed, driving course, which includes parallel parking and avoiding sudden trouble. The drivers do this under 3 conditions. First, without any distraction, then while talking on the phone, and then with a blood alcohol level around the legal limit. Although it lacked scientific rigour (there were only 2 subjects), that study produced a fun video (seen here).
Another study, from the University of Utah in 2006 (2), examined this aspect of phone use while driving more rigorously. It also found that drivers with the legal limit of alcohol in their blood were less dangerous than those who held a phone conversation while driving. In fact, cell phone users were more likely to crash than drunk drivers. Also, it found no difference between the performance of drivers who used hand-held phones and hands-free devices. (In case you’re wondering about the safety of allowing legally-drunk drivers on the road, relax: they were driving a simulator.)
It’s not a loss of manual dexterity: it’s the over-taxed brain that’s the problem.
Why?
The problem faced by our brains when driving and stimultaneously talking on the phone is attributed to something called ‘cognitive distraction’. It means that our brain can’t multi-task without losing something. And multi-tasking is what we are doing when we talk on the phone and drive. The brain is not doing two things at once, it’s switching rapidly between two mental tasks. This results in a reduced field of vision and slower reaction times. The ability to process moving images decreases significantly. Drivers on the phone can miss up to 50% of what’s going on, such as a sudden change in a traffic signal. In more technical terms, when we drive distracted, the brain rapidly and continuously shifts between concentration in the posterior, visual, and spatial areas and the prefrontal cortex.
What about other distraction?
Other activities can also distract a driver. Talking to passengers, listening to loud music, worrying about life, getting head . . . (BTW, driving while being blowjobbed is illegal). Music is interesting: apparently, loud and fast music often makes a driver speed up (if you’re a downhill skier, you know that playing fast rock on your earbuds makes you go faster). But slow, quieter tunes may lead to slower driving, and staying on task.
Work Cited
- Redelmeier, D. A. and Tibshirani, R. J., Association between cellular-telephone calls and motor vehicle collisions. New England Journal of Medicine 1997, 136:7, 453-458
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Strayer, D. L., F. A. Drews, and D. J. Crouch. A comparison of the cell phone driver and the drunk driver. Human Factors Summer 2006, 48(2):381-391.
