From Bill Turner comes this about this link I posted…
Back on Dec. 27 you posted a link to a blog posting arguing against any ban on using a cell phone while driving. The major point of that post was that it dismissed the case against it as based solely on anecdotes. To be fair, you might want to include a link to this article talking about the suppression of the very real evidence of how harmful this is. And if you spend a minute looking, you'll also find plenty of scientific research on "multitasking" with the vast preponderance of the evidence showing that people don't really multitask, we switch back and forth among tasks with considerable loss of efficiency (and that's brain processing efficiency) when doing so.
I find the anti-cell-phone-ban arguments to be strikingly like the anti-global warming arguments: if it would mean I can't do something I want to do, I won't look at your evidence no matter what, you're just wrong, that's all, because obviously the world was designed for my personal convenience or profit. It's much easier to assert that the "evidence" is false, anecdotal, a conspiracy, whatever, than to admit that I'm doing something harmful to others.
In fact, the comments on the article I gave the link to are pretty much all of this nature. Mostly people either want no ban, or a ban against everything except what they personally do, because what they do is safe/necessary/economically important/whatever.
I don't doubt that cell phone usage makes auto accidents more likely and I'd like to know more about "how likely" and how it's determined that a given crash was caused by someone being on their phone. While I didn't go through every line of the 266 page report listed, it does make the point repeatedly that any driver distraction increases the likelihood of a collision and I'd like to know more about how cell phone usage stacks up against distractions like listening to the radio, talking to a passenger and eating the fries you bought at the In-N-Out drive-thru.
The report also suggests that drivers not use cell phones except in an emergency and that strikes me as a pretty useless way to discuss the topic. If we pass a law that says you can only use a cell phone in case of an emergency, we're going to have to define what constitutes an emergency. Being lost? Being late? How about if I need to call Sergio and tell him to send me some info I need right away or Groo may be a day late? Is that an emergency?
I'm not trying to be evasive here. Yeah, cell phones make driving more dangerous. And since we've all had a taste of how convenient they can be in normal life, you're not going to ban them unless a pretty strong case can be made that they're worse than a lot of things, like listening to audio books, that no one wants to ban. I'd also love to hear how such a ban could be enforced. What do the countries that do have such a ban do? Do they prohibit other distractions? I don't think this report should have been suppressed. It should have been taken seriously and triggered more research. But a proper case for a ban has not yet been made.