14 DAY TRIAL // The National Safety Council (NSC), a non-profit, non-governmental organization urged federal law makers yesterday to restrict or ban the use of cell phones inside vehicles, citing new studies that show the practice is as dangerous when the bottom line is drawn as driving under the influence. NSC also asked businesses to prohibit the habit, saying that this could avert thousands of serious car crashes each year, in which talking on cell phones is held directly responsible.
The Harvard Center of Risk Analysis estimates that yearly, in the United States, approximately 6 percent of all car accidents occur because of talking or text messaging on cell phones. This amounts to more than 636,000 crashes, 12,000 serious injuries, and some 2,600 deaths. All of these figures, as well as the $43 billion bill attached to them, could be avoided if the use of phones in vehicles were to be banned, and violators of this rule heavily fined.
"Studies show that driving while talking on a cell phone is extremely dangerous and puts drivers at a four times greater risk of a crash. Driving drunk is also dangerous and against the law. When our friends have been drinking, we take the car keys away. It's time to take the cell phone away," argues NSC CEO and president, Janet Froetscher.
"Talking on a phone while driving is dangerous, period, and our advice to drivers is to simply don't do it. It taxes the cognitive skills of your brain at the expense of the driving at hand, and if the conversation is stressful your reaction time will not be as quick. Also, whoever you are talking with on the phone does not know what is going on around you, whereas someone in the car talking to you is aware of the circumstances," the Washington, DC, Governors Highway Safety Association spokesman, Jonathan Adkins, told LiveScience last year.
University of Utah assistant professor of psychology Frank Drews, one of the lead researchers on the influence of cell phones on driving performances, said that tests he conducted proved that talking and text messaging while driving can actually be more harmful than driving drunk. Test subjects who drove a computer simulator and talked on the phone were 4 times more likely to crash or collide with another vehicle than those in the control group.