At work we're forced to listen to John Tesh. On the Tesh's show he regularly has anti-driving while talking on a cell phone segments. These drive me nuts. The other day he claimed a study showed that drivers who are talking on cell phones- even ones with blue tooth- slow down traffic. Here's my beef with this: I, personally, don't have issues with talking on my phone while driving. I have a much more difficult time talking to people who are in the car with me. Furthermore, what about driving while eating and/or drinking, or driving with a backseat full of screaming, fighting, taddle-tailing kids? What about the studies for those situations? Are you going to tell me the mom with all the fighting, loud, crying kids in the car is less distracted then someone talking on a cell phone? Are we going to create legislation outlawing driving with kids? My problem with those who want to create cell phone laws is that they're trying to legislate distractibility, and we could do endless studies proving that everything from fellow passengers to billboards distract people and cause accidents, slower traffic etc... I think the focus on cell-phones is assinine; go after the soccer moms.
4 comments:
Ya, I am against the cell phone Nazi's myself.
I don't remember the exact statistics, but to the best of my recollection a study was done about 2-3 years ago about the "cell phone distraction" issue. What they found was that in accidents were there was a specific distractor involved, a cell phone was the contributing factor around 13% of the time. This put it around 5th on the list. #1 was food, #2 was the radio, and #3 was another person in the vehicle. It just makes sense... you aren't tempted to look at the other person when talking on a cell phone. I'll see if I can dig up a source and repost it here.
And as far as slowing down traffic is concerned, people already drive too fast and need to slow down. Unless they are slowing down traffic below the posted speed limit, I have no problem with that.
Ok, my memory on the specifics was a bit off, but I did find the source. Cell phones are actually 8th on the list, accounting for only 1.5% of accidents involving distracted drivers. Here is the source: http://www.hsrc.unc.edu/safety_info/distracted_drowsy/top_ten_driver_distractions.cfm
i thought about the slower traffic issue too, in fact, i wouldn't be surprised if the tesh did a segment in the past on the dangers of people driving too fast.
hey now i'll be one of those soccer moms someday!!!!!
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