roscoe
Supreme Mariner
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- Oct 30, 2002
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http://www.livescience.com/technology/050201_cell_danger.html <br /><br />Cell Phones kill !!<br /><br />Finally, empirical proof you can blame chatty 20-somethings for stop-and-go traffic on the way to work.<br /><br /><br />A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they're as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.<br /><br /><br />"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."<br /><br /><br />The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.<br /><br /><br />Traffic jams and death<br /><br /><br />Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal's publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.<br /><br /><br />The reason is now obvious:<br /><br /><br />Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.<br /><br /><br />"Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to get back into the normal flow of traffic," Strayer said. "The net result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic."<br /><br /><br />Strayer and his colleagues have been down this road before. In 2001, they found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. In 2003 they revealed a reason: Drivers look but don't see, because they're distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.<br /><br /><br />Separate research last year at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supported the conclusion that hands-free cell phone use causes driver distraction.<br /><br /><br />"With younger adults, everything got worse," said Arthur Kramer, who led the Illinois study. "Both young adults and older adults tended to show deficits in performance. They made more errors in detecting important changes and they took longer to react to the changes."<br /><br /><br />The impaired reactions involved seconds, not just fractions of a second, so stopping distances increased by car-lengths.<br /><br /><br />Older drivers more cautious<br /><br /><br />The latest study used high-tech simulators. It included people aged 18 to 25 and another group aged 65 to 74. Elderly drivers were slower to react when talking on the phone, too.<br /><br /><br />The simulations uncovered a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions by drivers using cell phones.
<br /><br />I hate cell phones, I only have one because my employer has issued me one. They distract you no matter what you are doing. It scares the crap out of me when I'm working in a tight space with high voltage. When the thing vibrates, it does make me jump and then I lose my thoughts on where I was at in troubleshooting.<br /><br />Then the phone seems to always ring when I have my hands covered with something like grease, or in the process of using both hands where I can't answer it. Then the boss gets upset if I don't answer it right away. I did explain this to him, so now he uses text msg for me to return a call at my convience.<br /><br />No doubt cell phones is an increasing danger on the roads.