Should eating and driving be illegal? How about drinking water while driving?

If drinking water must be hands-free, I'd use one of those water dispensing helmets.

 

This has been studied ad-nauseum. Driving while using a cell phone is as dangerous as driving while drunk. It doesn't matter what kind of cell phone it is -- hands-free and hand-held are both as dangerous. The problem is that the drivers mind is distracted by the conversation, not that the hand is in use. Discerning the words from a low-fidelity reproduction of a voice takes a surprising amount of attention. Understanding and responding to the meaning also requires attention. That reduces the attention that the driver pays to whatever is happening outside the car.

A collection of peer-reviewed research papers is available online at: http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/

An less technical summary is available at: http://unews.utah.edu/p/?r=062206-1

 

Hands-Free has been shown to yield no improvement in safety. The researchers believe that this can be attributed to the physical location of the person on the other en of the call. Here's the basic logic of their conclusions:

A passenger to driver conversation is less distracting because the passenger is right there and can be aware of an impending dangerous situation. In most cases this results in the conversation halting so the driver can deal with the situation.

A person on the other end of a cell call has no idea what is going on in the vehicle and will continue attempting to converse even when something very dangerous is happening.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-h...,2119996.story

http://mentalhealth.about.com/librar...llphone701.htm

http://www.vti.se/templates/Report__...?reportid=3544

 

I would vote to make them illegal. I witnessed a head on crash where the lady on the phone simply went right into the opposite lane. I actually drove before there were cell phones. Somehow the Earth still turned. About 10% of people actually have a legitimate use for a cell phone, the others have them because companies like Verizon convinced us we all can not do without them.

I work in IT. Every 5 Weeks I am the primary person on call for an 86 Billion dollar fortune 500 company. Yet I have never taken a call while driving. Most people are not as important as they like to think.