Talking, not phones, at fault

This latest proposal in Augusta to restrict the use of cell phones while driving suggests that our lawmakers are bound to keep making the same fuzzy connections over this perennially contentious issue.

This newest bill, which looks just like the other failed proposals that have come before it in the last few years, would ban the use of hand-held cell phones by drivers. Among those exempted are doctors and emergency workers, which makes sense, as well as holders of commercial vehicle licenses who commandeer massive tractor-trailer trucks down the highway, which makes no sense at all.

The thinking behind the bill is that driving with a cell phone pressed to one’s ear and only one hand on the steering wheel causes the average motorist to become overly distracted, thereby posing an unnecessary risk to others on the road. Add to that the numerous other cell-phone innovations that have come along – text messaging, picture-taking, Internet surfing – and you wind up with a driving population that’s too busy multitasking to tend to the critical business of actually getting safely from one place to another.

Critics contend, as they always have when these bills come up, that it’s unfair to single out hand-held cell phones when drivers routinely engage in many other activities that are equally distracting, maybe more so. What about fiddling with the radio? What about eating, drinking, grooming, reading and screaming at the kids in the back seat?

Round and round it goes, not just in Maine but in every state in the country where lawmakers have considered and enacted similar restrictions on phones in cars.

Right now, Maine drivers with permits are prohibited from using any kind of cell phone whatsoever, and drivers under 18 are barred from using them for the first six months after getting a license. It’s a smart law, too, that eliminates at least one unnecessary distraction while the state’s most inexperienced drivers get some miles under their belts.

But if this new bill were to become law in Maine for the rest of us, don’t hold your breath while waiting for it to lower the accident rate significantly, if at all. The truth is, as a mounting body of evidence by researchers makes clear, the most dangerous aspect of phone conversations while driving is not the distraction of holding the phone but the mental disconnection from the road caused by focusing on the conversation itself.

Forcing people to talk with hands-free devices only would allow them to place two hands on the wheel – a good thing, of course, as long as that other hand is not holding a Big Mac, a hairbrush or an open book – but it will not eliminate the real risk, which is that a brain engaged in a telephone conversation can become inattentive to road signs, streetlights, highway exits, crosswalks, or even that line of traffic slowing to a stop in front of it.

That’s the conclusion of at least four major studies dating back to 1997, when the New England Journal of Medicine published research done in Toronto showing that phone conversations while driving can be nearly as risky as driving while legally drunk. Reaction time is slowed significantly, the journal reported, as too much of the brainpower necessary for safe driving is channeled into thinking about the matters discussed on the phone.

A study conducted three years ago at the University of Utah referred to this mental distraction as “inattention blindness,” which can cause drivers on the phone to miss important highway signs and drift dangerously between lanes of traffic without even knowing it.

“We’ve evaluated and come to the conclusion that hands-free use is just as risky or perhaps riskier than hand-held phones, because it’s the cognitive distraction that can compromise driving,” a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said recently in a New York Times story about the debate over hands-free laws in effect in New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia.

In other words, the research suggests, the only law that could effectively eliminate the hazards of talking on the phone while driving is one that bans the practice outright, in any form. That, unfortunately, is not about to happen anytime soon.

That means that passing this newest cell phone legislation in Maine, as well meaning as it might be, would probably only wind up generating a slew of traffic tickets and ill will without really making our roads any safer in the long run. And where’s the benefit in that?