Hidden Dangers Of Being Upwardly Mobile
Newcastle Herald
Saturday February 18, 2006
IT is an unfortunate fact of life that technology sometimes progresses faster than the human brain can absorb it.
Such is the case with mobile phones. Although they are mighty convenient, it appears that we humans have not mastered the ability to drive a vehicle and use a phone at the same time.Hands-free phones don't solve the problem. What gets you into trouble, it seems, isn't so much fumbling with the phone (though that doesn't help) as the apparent fact that driving and conducting a conversation at the same time consumes more mental processing power than most people can spare. Mobile phones are involved in a lot of crashes. There is evidence in one study of 456 accidents in Australia requiring a hospital visit that in 9 per cent of cases the driver had been talking on a mobile phone during the 10 minutes prior to the accident. The authors concluded that a person using a mobile phone when driving is four times more likely to have a crash that will result in hospital attendance.In another study, researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute installed recording equipment in 100 cars, then watched what happened over the ensuing 13 months. They recorded 69 crashes, 761 near crashes, and 8295 lesser close calls. Drivers were distracted by mobile phones in close to 700 cases.Hands-free phones don't help much. A University of Utah study suggests that in certain respects drunks actually do better behind the wheel than phone users they seem to stay closer to the speed limit and brake faster in response to braking vehicles ahead.
© 2006 Newcastle Herald
