A new study sponsored by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says drivers who use cell phones quadruple their chances of getting into a crash serious enough to injure themselves – and the risk isn’t substantially reduced by a hands-free device.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal’s latest issue, is based on an analysis of the phone use of 456 drivers treated in hospital emergency rooms in Perth, Australia, for injuries suffered in crashes from April 2002 to July 2004.
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Using a hand-held phone while driving is illegal in Australia, as it is in New York, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, and many European countries, but dozens of study participants who didn’t own hands-free devices still reported using their phones.
Only 7 percent of the drivers reported using their phones in the 10 minutes before they crashed, though 90 percent said they were carrying them, and 72 percent said they used their phones while driving at least occasionally. (More than half made calls after they crashed.)
By looking at the drivers’ cell phone billing records, the researchers confirmed their usage patterns and estimated their odds of crashing. Men and women, under 30 and over, all had heightened risk, the study found. Hands-free users were 3.8 times likelier to crash; hand-held phone users were 4.9 times as likely. Speed, alcohol, drugs and fatigue were only involved in a minority of the crashes, and the weather for three-quarters of the accidents was fine.
“The main finding of a fourfold increase in injury crash risk was consistent across groups of drivers,” said Anne McCartt, the Institute’s vice president for research and an author of the study, in a news release. She said the similarity of risk with hands-free phones “isn’t intuitive,” because “you’d think using a hands-free phone would be less distracting,” but it may be that many hands-free phones used today “aren’t really hands-free.”
A study at the University of Rhode Island found a similar pattern and attributed it to the distraction from the conversation itself, which the URI researchers said gave drivers “tunnel vision.” The URI study also found the effect continued well after the conversation ended.
“Mobile phone use while driving may result in physical or cognitive distraction,” the Perth study concluded. Many jurisdictions have banned hand-held phones in response, the study says, but “there is no safety advantage” associated with the hands-free devices now in use, and laws limiting all phone use while driving “would be difficult to enforce.”
Better hands-free technology might still help, the researchers wrote, but “if this new technology actually increases mobile phone use in cars, it could contribute to even more crashes. At least in the short term, it seems likely that mobile phone use in cars will continue to grow, despite the growing evidence of the risk it creates.”
The full report is at www.bmj.com.
