Assuming that a passenger, unlike someone on the other end of a phone conversation, automatically or instinctively knows when a driver needs to focus seems like a weak excuse for an outright ban on cell phone use in cars. There have been more than a few occasions when I've had to tell my passengers to shut up. And one could just as easily argue that a driver talking to passengers is more likely to take his or her eyes of the road than is a driver talking on a cell phone (I don't need to see the phone's reaction or give the phone a knowing glance).Katygunnut wrote:I would point to a couple things that have been brought up already in this thread. Someone in the car can see the driving situation and know when the driver needs to focus (and they need to stop talking). That same person can also read the drivers body language, so the driver does not need to focus nearly as much on conveying their thoughts through words alone.
From personal experience, I have had many cases where someone wanted to keep talking to me as I was going around a curve, in a rain storm, with a semi starting to creep over into my lane, etc. Taking even a second to say "hold on" is one second that can much better be spent on situational awareness in that case. I have done both, and personally feel that a conversation with someone who is physically there with you is easier, and requires lesss focus, than having a conversation on the phone. This is one reason why I find it is much more efficient to get people in the same room if a problem needs to be solved or something needs to be clarified at work, for example.
All of the studies I've seen suggest that the conversation itself is the real distraction. People have been carrying on conversations in cars for as long as there have been cars. This recent phobia about cell phones in cars is no different than recent mass hysteria about child abductions and other such causes-of-the-month, most of which pose no more threat than they did fifty years ago.
Those proposing these cell phone bans typically fall into one of two categories: those who think we can legislate ourselves into a danger-free utopia and those who wish society could return to a simpler time before we had all of these technological nuisances like the Internet and cell phones and the polio vaccine. Both groups fail to realize just how reliant our society has become on such perilous technological vices as cell phones and navigation devices. The majority of the population isn't interested in returning to the days before we could call from the car and say, "Hey, I'm stuck in traffic, so go ahead and start the meeting without me," or, "Is it exit 308 or exit 309?"
As far as I know, there hasn't been a single study showing that talking on a cell phone is any more distracting than talking to a passenger. Blaming somebody's cell phone has simply replaced blaming somebody's gender or ethnicity as the official road rage battle cry. Thirty years ago, a man might have looked at the driver who almost sideswiped him and responded, "Oh, it figures--it's a woman driver." Now the man looks at the woman who almost sideswiped him and responds, "Oh, it figures--she's on her cell phone." Both are simply knee-jerk responses--a way of boiling down the complexities of any given situation into something tangible on which we can place blame.
Society loves a villain, somebody or something to blame. And people love riding on bandwagons. So any time society can nominate a villain and start loading up the "blame that" bandwagon, the public gets pretty excited. After all, if banning something will "save just one life," shouldn't we do it? If your answer is "yes," you can make out your check to "The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence."