The Scientific Odds That Using a Cell Phone Will Make You a Bad Driver...
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x (aka dmuck)
Jan 3 '14, 11:54
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The Scientific Odds That Using a Cell Phone Will Make You a Bad Driver
Emily Badger
8:01 AM ET
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Common sense suggests that any activity that pulls your eyes away the road will impair your ability to see what's coming from the driver's seat. If you're looking up a phone number in your smart phone, you can't look at the car in front of you. If you're peering down into the fast food bag wedged between your legs, you're probably not simultaneously scoping out your rear-view mirror.
So it probably won't surprise you to learn that even people who are experienced drivers are more likely to crash while dialing a cell phone. Here, though, are some awfully specific risk ratios: An experienced driver doing this is about two-and-a-half times more likely to get in a crash or have a near-miss than if they weren't fumbling with a phone at all. And the crash risk for novice drivers goes up more than eight-fold. Just reaching for a phone makes a novice driver seven times more likely to have a crash or close call.
These figures come from a new study just published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The results are particularly fascinating for how the researchers came up with them: The study recruited 42 freshly minted drivers in southwestern Virginia, and 109 more seasoned drivers in the Washington, D.C., area, who had, on average, 20 years of experience driving. The researchers outfitted their cars with a host of devices: GPS systems, sensors, cameras pointing toward the driver and outward at the road. All of this technology then continuously recorded what happened next, over a full year for the novices and 18 months for the other drivers.
- linky (www.theatlanticcities.com)
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