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New Insight into Cell Phone Use and Driving Distraction

Study separates fact from myth

By James Limbach
ConsumerAffairs.com

July 29, 2009

And it's not very reassuring.

"Given recent catastrophic crash events and disturbing trends, there is an alarming amount of misinformation and confusion regarding cell phone and texting use while behind the wheel of a vhicle," says says Dr. Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. "The findings from our research at VTTI can help begin to clear up these misconceptions as it is based on real-world driving data. We conduct transportation safety research in an effort to equip the public with information that can save lives."

In VTTI's studies that included light vehicle drivers and truck drivers, manual manipulation of phones such as dialing and texting of the cell phone lead to a substantial increase in the risk of bein involved in a safety-critical event (e.g., crash or near crash). However, talking or listening increased risk much less for light vehicles and not at all for trucks. Text messaging on a cell phone was associated with the highest risk of all cell phone related tasks.

Several recent high visibility trucking and transit crashes have been directly linked to texting from a cell phone. VTTI's research showed that text messaging, which had the highest risk of over 20 times worse than driving while not using a phone, also had the longest duration of eyes off road time (4.6 seconds over a 6-second interval). This equates to a driver traveling the length of a football field at 55 mph without looking at the roadway. Talking/listening to a cell phone allowed drivers to maintain eyes on the road and were not associated with an increased safety risk to nearly the same degree.

Recent results from other researchers using driving simulators suggest that talking and listening is as dangerous as visually distracting cell phone tasks. The results from VTTI's naturalistic driving studies clearly indicate that this is not the case.

For example, talking and listening to a cell phone is not nearly as risky as driving while drunk at the legal limit of alcohol. Recent comparisons made in the literature greatly exaggerate the cell phone risk relative to the very serious effects of alcool use, which increases the risk of a fatal crash approximately seven times that of sober driving.

Using simple fatal crash and phone use statistics, if talking on cell phones was as risky as driving while drunk, the number of fatal crashes would have increased roughly 50% in the last decade instead of remaining largely unchanged.

These results show conclusively that a real key to significantly improving safety is keeping your eyes on the road. In contrast, “cognitively intense” tasks (e.g., emotional conversations, “books-on-tape”, etc.) can have a measurable effect in the laboratory, but the actual driving risks are much lower in comparison.

Based on findings from research studies, VTTI recommends:

• A ban on texting in moving vehicles for all drivers. This activity has the potential to create a true crash epidemic if texting-type tasks continue to grow in popularity and the generation of frequent text message senders reach driving age in large number.

• Banning cell phone use for newly licensed teen drivers. VTTI's research has shown that teens tend to engage in cell phone tasks much more frequently, and in much more risky situations, than adults. Thus, the studies indicate that teens are four times more likely to get into a related crash or near crash event than their adult conterparts.

The researchers say it is important to keep in mind that a driving simulator is not actual driving. Driving simulators engage participants in tracking tasks in a laboratory. As such, researchers that conduct simulator studies must be cautious when suggesting that conclusions based on simulator studies are aplicable to actual driving.

With the introduction of naturalistic driving studies that record drivers (through continuous video and kinematic sensors) in actual driving situations, researchers now have a scientific method to study driver behavior in real-world driving conditions in the presence of real-world daily pressures.

As such, if the point of transportation safety research is to understand driver behavior in the real-world (e.g., increase crash risk due to cell phone use), and when conflicting findings occur between naturalistic studies and simulator studies, findings from the real-world, and not the simulator-world, must be considered the gold standard.

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