A law going into effect in California today prohibits the use of cell phones without hands-free headsets in cars. Violators will be fined $20 for their first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses. The law is even stricter for those under 18, who are prohibited from any cell phone usage at all while driving, including hands-free talking or text messaging. California is the first state to enact such a law, but it looks like many more states will follow suit, with legislation in the works in 33 more states. Legislators feel that cell phones cause a distraction to drivers and cause them to react more slowly to changing road conditions.
The question, however, is whether or not that's the major problem facing drivers today. Studies have been done proving that drivers talking on cell phones are as hazardous as drunk drivers. However, I'm willing to bet that slow to react drivers aren't nearly as dangerous as those who drive recklessly and impatiently, weaving in and out of traffic. And I'm equally willing to bet that increased cell phone usage has a strong correlation with such driving.
We live in a culture where nearly any information we want is at our fingertips. Want to know if your best friend really did kiss that cute boy in chemistry class? Why spend all that time dialing their number when you could just send them a text message? Tools like the internet, cell phones, text messaging, instant messengers, and others all us to get needed information quickly. But they also remove our need to wait. While patience was once a virtue, it's now an annoyance. I can be in a meeting and still check baseball scores. (Not that I'd want to, considering how this season has gone for my Colorado Rockies.) I can be having a conversation with someone while sending instant messages through Skype to someone else. We're always looking for ways to shave precious seconds from our schedule. Waiting is a thing of the past. You can see this in driving habits all the time. People fly around corners without looking. Drivers on the freeway blaze down the road darting between lanes. It doesn't save them much time - maybe a few seconds here and there - but it feels like they're going faster and more efficiently.
I dig some digging for statistics to back up my point. While I don't have exact statistics on reckless driving charges, I do have access to traffic fatalities from 1997-2005.
During that time period, fatalities rose by about 250 per year, or a rate of about 0.6%. That rate seemed small to me, so I compared it to the rate of population increase over the same period. (Logically, if there are more drivers on the road, there will be more accidents.) The U.S. population increased nearly twice as quickly - just over 1% yearly. It would seem that the increase in population more than explains the rise in auto fatalities, until you see the spike between 2000 and 2001. Fatalities increased by over 1300 in one year, for a rise of 3.6%. That's six times the average over that nine-year period. However, cell phones were not released in 2001, but rather in 1999. That means that cell phones probably aren't responsible for causing the spike. Is it possible that habits associated with cell phones created the spike we see? It's difficult to say without more data, but my guess is yes.That's not to say that California's anti-cell phone law won't have a positive effect. It probably will. But it does suggest that maybe we're treating the symptoms rather than the problem itself. Correcting the American short attention span may be more difficult than just a $20 fine.
3 comments:
While I agree that kids should spend time away from the electronic world, I'm not sure that attention spans are getting shorter (yes, ADHD diagnoses are increasing, but some parents will do anything to explain their child's unremarkableness). Not related to using cell phones, but to the internet and attention, is this article: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/06/web_making_us_worrie.html.
I don't quite follow. If cellphones aren't responsible but the habits associated with cellphones are, then where were these habits before? If the habits are caused by cellphones, then cellphones are still responsible.
Could perhaps the 2001 spike be explained by increased SUV sales? Because if one of those (instead of that Camry) had hit my old Eclipse, I'd be very dead.
I am a researcher at UCF who studied this, let me just say~ you are correct. It is not the cell phones themselves that create the problem. We used neurofeedback to see what brain waves were associated with the higher distraction while operating cell phones and Ipods.
What we found was that, hands free or not is not the problem. These dives and conversation present new mental tasks. Human minds have a sort of clock speed, we can switch between topics but it never processes more than one item at a time. There is no such thing as true mental multitasking.
Our study suggested that any conversation would impair drivers. But what about passengers? Cell phones are related to higher incidence of accidents, not just any conversation. So a theory was made that passengers can respond to the situations in the car and automatically go quiet while drivers are performing difficult tasks. Evidence of this was seen in a study where in one condition, a passenger was blind folded and ear plugged, and could only hear through a headphone in one ear. The other condition the passenger sat in the simulator as another passenger would with no impaired senses. In both conditions, the passenger asked the driver a long set of involved questions. The passenger that could see and hear, paused while the driver was in difficult situations. The end result was that the blind folded and earpluged condition resulted in more frequent accidents.
There you have it. The human mind simply cannot focus on two involved tasks at the same time, regular passengers automatically adjust for this while a person on the other side of a cell phone can't. When involved situation meets involved conversation, hands free or not it will be an accident.
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