Cell Phone Use Ups Accident Risk
By UsaydTalking on a cell phone makes you drive like a retiree â€â€? even if you’re only a teen, a new study shows. A report from the University of Utah says when motorists between 18 and 25 talk on cell phones, they drive like elderly people â€â€? moving and reacting more slowly and increasing their risk of accidents.
“If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver,” said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study. “It’s like instant aging.”
And it doesn’t matter whether the phone is hand-held or handsfree, he said. Any activity requiring a driver to “actively be part of a conversation” likely will impair driving abilities, Strayer said.
In fact, motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunken drivers with blood-alcohol levels exceeding 0.08, Strayer and colleague Frank Drews, an assistant professor of psychology, found during research conducted in 2003.
Their new study appears in this winter’s issue of Human Factors, the quarterly journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Strayer said they found that when 18- to-25-year-olds were placed in a driving simulator and talked on a cellular phone, they reacted to brake lights from a car in front of them as slowly as 65- to 74-year-olds who were not using a cell phone…
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What about if you are on handsfree? 