The New York Times this week ‘outed’ the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which back in 2003, failed to show the US public research it had commissioned, which showed that driving while using a mobile phone made an accident 8 times more likely.
That was the same year that the UK revealed similar research and made it illegal to drive and use a handheld mobile phone at the same time.
The interesting thing about US studies is that there is no distinction between using a handheld device ‘ which can be used to text, view the internet and make calls ‘ and a phone which has a Bluetooth headset. They are both thought to be dangerous and the act of just speaking on the phone has been shown to distract drivers.
However if you banned the use of speaking through a headset, then you’d pretty much have to ban passengers from speaking, since this can potentially have the same effect. Same goes for music players and maybe in-car TVs and GPS devices.
Effectively the studies took in 10,000 samples and showed that any kind of multitasking created a serious threat while driving.
Now US lawmakers are almost certain to take another look at the cellphone as a cause of accident and some commentators are saying that they are at least as dangerous as drunk driving. If that leads to the US making a law that goes further than those made outside the US ‘ for instance if they ban Bluetooth headsets ‘ than that will inevitably lead to legal reviews elsewhere. If that happened it could be the end of Bluetooth headsets entirely.
The reason the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided not to make its findings pubic was because it was worried about angering Congress, the part of the US government which votes its funds.
Civil rights advocacy groups use the US Freedom of Information Act to get access to the research and now they are claiming some 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents were caused by cellphone users, and that’s just for 2002, the year before the research was done. About twice as many people speak on the cellphone while driving in the US now which might imply double the number of accidents caused in this way.
Part of the released documents was a letter to the then Transportation Secretary saying that hands free laws won’t solve the problem and a total ban for the use of cellphones in cars was going to be called for, which could potentially happen in the US now. About as good an idea as prohibition.