The Utah Legislature should enact a ban on cell phone use while driving. There is mounting evidence that the distraction caused by cell phones causes impairment similar to that caused by alcohol, a longtime culprit in avoidable traffic deaths and injuries. The National Safety Council has called for a nationwide prohibition of the use of the phones by motorists.
Driving under the influence has long been recognized as a leading factor in traffic accidents. Historically, some 50 percent of traffic fatalities in the United States have been alcohol-related. In addition to these fatalities, many people who survive have suffered life-changing injuries. Jacqueline Saburido for example, was burned beyond recognition in a crash caused by a drunk driver in 1999.
A team of researchers including U psychology professors David Strayer and Frank Drews along with Dennis Crouch, found that “the impairments associated with using a cell phone while driving can be as profound as those associated with driving while drunk.”
Strayer and his co-authors conducted research in which they compared the driving of subjects who drank a mixture of orange juice and vodka until their blood alcohol level reached the legal limit of .08 percent with that of a group of subjects who had no alcohol but were engaged in conversations on either hand-held or hands-free phones during the experiment. The subjects were placed in a high-fidelity driving simulator and put through a regimen that approximated real-world driving under good conditions.
Strayer and his team found that the subjects who were using cell phones exhibited slower reaction times and were involved in more accidents than when they were not using phones. Most interestingly, they found that there was no significant difference between those drivers using hand-held and hands&-free phones.
Strayer and Drews later teamed up with fellow U psychology professor Monisha Pasupathi in another study in which they compared the effects of cell phone conversations on driving with the effects of conversations with “passengers” who were in the simulator with the subjects. In their research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they found that cell phone conversations produced the most driving errors while “passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving.”
Similarities in the impairment of intoxicated drivers and drivers using cell phones are readily observable outside the laboratory. Forensic DUI expert Robert LaPier, who served as lead DUI instructor for the Idaho State Police, said “driving 10 mph or more under the limit is a cue of a possible DUI/DWI driver.”
Driving too slow is also a trait most of us have noticed with drivers yakking away on their cell phones.
In Utah, using a cell phone while driving is not prohibited in itself but could be considered as contributing to careless driving under Utah Code 41-6a-1715. The state’s DUI statute Utah Code 41-6a-502, on the other hand, does not require a driver to commit any other offense before it applies.
This distinction makes no sense8212;the victims of an impaired driver are just as dead when the impaired driver was gabbing away on his or her Nokia as they would be if that driver were guzzling a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Steve Warrick