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Drivers on Cell Phones Kill Thousands, Snarl Traffic
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 01 February 2005
01:52 pm ET
Finally, empirical proof you can blame chatty 20-somethings for stop-and-go traffic on the way to work.
A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they’re as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.
“If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone,” said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. “It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”
The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.
Traffic jams and death
Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal’s publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
The reason is now obvious:
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.
“Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to get back into the normal flow of traffic,” Strayer said. “The net result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic.”
Strayer and his colleagues have been down this road before. In 2001, they found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. In 2003 they revealed a reason: Drivers look but don’t see, because they’re distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.
Separate research last year at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supported the conclusion that hands-free cell phone use causes driver distraction.
“With younger adults, everything got worse,” said Arthur Kramer, who led the Illinois study. “Both young adults and older adults tended to show deficits in performance. They made more errors in detecting important changes and they took longer to react to the changes.”
The impaired reactions involved seconds, not just fractions of a second, so stopping distances increased by car-lengths.
Older drivers more cautious
The latest study used high-tech simulators. It included people aged 18 to 25 and another group aged 65 to 74. Elderly drivers were slower to react when talking on the phone, too.
The simulations uncovered a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions by drivers using cell phones.
livescience.com/technology/050201_cell_danger.html
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 01 February 2005
01:52 pm ET
Finally, empirical proof you can blame chatty 20-somethings for stop-and-go traffic on the way to work.
A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they’re as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.
“If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone,” said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. “It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”
The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.
Traffic jams and death
Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal’s publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
The reason is now obvious:
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.
“Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to get back into the normal flow of traffic,” Strayer said. “The net result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic.”
Strayer and his colleagues have been down this road before. In 2001, they found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. In 2003 they revealed a reason: Drivers look but don’t see, because they’re distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.
Separate research last year at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supported the conclusion that hands-free cell phone use causes driver distraction.
“With younger adults, everything got worse,” said Arthur Kramer, who led the Illinois study. “Both young adults and older adults tended to show deficits in performance. They made more errors in detecting important changes and they took longer to react to the changes.”
The impaired reactions involved seconds, not just fractions of a second, so stopping distances increased by car-lengths.
Older drivers more cautious
The latest study used high-tech simulators. It included people aged 18 to 25 and another group aged 65 to 74. Elderly drivers were slower to react when talking on the phone, too.
The simulations uncovered a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions by drivers using cell phones.
livescience.com/technology/050201_cell_danger.html
Just once I’d like to go to dinner without hearing half of someone’s conversation, or a movie without the stupid things ringing. Don’t even get me started about phones in Mass…
, we;re going to make a big pile of them, pound them flat and then have a bonfire…
