iPhone

[smilingcat]

When you drive a car, DRIVE!!

It's not about yakking on the phone.
It's not about putting your make up on.
It's not about reading your morning paper.
It's not about playing with the radio station...
It's not about eating your brekkie.

Each second you are distracted, you travel 88 feet at 60MPH. Enough to crash.

Several years ago, in Irvine California, on quiet Sunday morning, on a 4 lane road with very light traffic, a car (I think it was high end BMW) was involved in a crash. Wrapped around a tree. Driver was dead at the scene. No skid mark. No broken pieces of car on the road leading up to the crash scene. It was determined that the driver was going at very high speed and was talking on the phone. He was distracted and veered off the road and bulls-eyed into a big oak tree.

I take my driving very seriously. Maintain my situational awareness around me at all times. You should too. no ear phone/buds... I've seen distracted drivers run a stale red light. Yes on one occasion, it collided and totaled the SUV.

Oregon also has hands-free only law. Hands free should be banned too. I'm bit sensitive. My sister and my twin nephews were just a year old babies when their car was rear ended. It is amazing they survived at all. Nothing was left of their car. My sister was waiting at a red light when they got rear ended by someone going near 60MPH is what I understood.

[Dogmama]

Hands free should be banned too.

Research shows that just talking on a cell, with or without hands free, is a distraction = drunk driving. So, I don't "get" why hands free is OK? Is the phone lobby that powerful in Washington?

[Catrin]

Research shows that just talking on a cell, with or without hands free, is a distraction = drunk driving. So, I don't "get" why hands free is OK? Is the phone lobby that powerful in Washington?

hmmmm....I will play the devil's advocate here. What separates this from talking to someone in the car? That can be at least as serious a distraction, especially for people who are accustomed to driving solo...

[OakLeaf]

I'm not sure they've scientifically identified what the difference is, only that there is one, and multiple studies have confirmed it. Theories include the passenger having some awareness of road conditions and shutting up or even alerting the driver; or psychological factors that say the driver isn't "removing" her consciousness from inside the car.

There are specific behaviors that are stereotypical of people driving on the phone, and most of them relate to tunnel vision. I don't encourage anyone to talk while driving, but if you do it and you're not aware of the tunnel vision you get, you might just give it a try on a flat, straight, untrafficked piece of road. Start talking to someone. (Dial hands free or while you're stopped.) Make sure they know you're doing an experiment and that they're prepared for you to drop the phone at any second. Now make sure you're seeing with your whole eyes. Keep your eyes on the road and (while talking to the person about something ELSE), identify everything in your peripheral vision and predict what it's going to do and/or where hazards might be coming from.

Betcha can't do it. I sure can't. That's why you'll usually see people on the phone "attaching" themselves to other vehicles - either by tailgating or by shadowing someone's blind spot. They can only really see one thing while they're talking and driving, so they attach themselves to another vehicle and do whatever the other driver does.

It can be tough sometimes trying to shake a phone addict when you're driving the car they're attached to!



I'll add that I think it's the tunnel vision that makes phone addicts especially dangerous to us cyclists and runners, because it exacerbates target fixation. As a motorcyclist and bicyclist, I'm well aware of target fixation (both in myself and in other drivers), but it wasn't until I started running (facing traffic) that I really became aware of how enormous a problem it is and how ill-educated most drivers are about it. When a driver can only see one thing (tunnel vision), and then that thing becomes YOU (because they're suddenly looking at something they're not used to seeing on the road) and then they AIM for you (because tunnel vision plus target fixation means they can literally only drive in the direction they can see in - BTDT myself [not on the phone], totalled my moto but luckily only got some bruises and didn't hurt the other driver) - that's how cyclists and little kids walking to school die. Right? You read all the time how somebody got run over on the shoulder or even on the sidewalk, and the police report says "it's unknown why the driver left the roadway," when in fact it's perfectly obvious why the driver left the roadway. Target fixation. Not necessarily involving a phone, but phones seriously exacerbate it.

This is drifty, but it's important. Please. Seriously. You're not just endangering yourselves - but your own safety is valuable, too, and we'd miss you.

[Dogmama]

http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/16/3/128.short

If you don't want to click on it - here is the gist

Moreover, in-vehicle conversations do not interfere with driving as much as cell-phone conversations do, because drivers are better able to synchronize the processing demands of driving with in-vehicle conversations than with cell-phone conversations.

and another

http://cellphonefreedriving.ca/media...istraction.pdf

when controlling for driving difficulty and time
on task, cell phone drivers may actually exhibit greater impairments (i.e., more accidents and
less responsive driving behavior) than legally intoxicated drivers. These data also call into
question driving regulations that prohibit hand-held cell phones and permit hands-free cell
phones, because no significant differences were found in the impairments to driving caused by
these two modes of cellular communication.

and finally

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=506599 (click on the PSU PDF)

People sometimes ask why cell phone conversation is
risky, in that conversation with passengers in the car does
not seem to cause accidents. We believe passengers
moderate their speech based on their observation of
current driving conditions. For example, most people
would stop talking to a driver who is passing a truck on a
two-lane mountain road after dark