Driving while chatting isn't just hazardous, it can cause more traffic. A recent study by Strayer and colleagues found that drivers who are stuck in traffic can in part blame other drivers who are gabbing on the phone for the holdup. Or, as Strayer put it: "That SOB on the cellphone is slowing you down, and making you late." That's because drivers on cellphones drive more slowly and are less likely to pass slow-moving vehicles. If about 10 percent of the people driving during rush hour are using a cellphone, the net effect is that the commute may be 10 percent slower.
As long as the Model-T has been on the road, people have been conversing with the passengers in their vehicles, if only to scream at the pesky kids, "Shut up! I'm trying to drive!" But there's a difference between talking to somebody in the car and on the phone. Most passengers in the car adjust their conversation to what's happening on the road, quieting down when traffic gets hectic or even pointing out hazards up ahead, acting as a second set of eyes. The person on the other end of a cellphone call might not know you're driving, much less be aware of the road conditions. "The difficulty is that the party on the other line has no sense of your driving situation and just yaks, and the driver elects to do it, too," explains Paul Allan Green, research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, where he leads the Driver Interface Group.
Inside a car, there can be natural lulls in the conversation of 20 or 30 seconds, and there is no awkwardness associated with it. Not so on the cellphone call, where there's more social pressure on the driver to hold up his or her end of the conversation, if only to assure the other party that the call hasn't been dropped. "There is all sorts of social pressure to continue the conversation and not break it off," says Green. When a driver does stop talking to focus on the road, his caller is likely to ask, "Hey, can you hear me? Are you there?" The caller tries "to reengage the driver at the wrong time," says Strayer.
Further, researchers find that people tend to be more chatty in a cell conversation than an in-car one. "Cellphone conversations are more intense than in-car conversation," says Paul Atchley, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas. That intensity can be measured. Researchers in England studied drivers' conversations with both passengers and callers. They found that people used a higher number of words per minute on cellphone conversations.
In the end, car passengers just have more skin in the game. "People in the car have their own safety at risk," says Atchley. "It's to their advantage to not put the driver in the dangerous situation, so we as passengers tend to edit ourselves pretty effectively."
Researchers doubt that banning hand-held phones gets to the root of the problem: the conversation. Sure, it's safer to have both hands on the wheel, but no one is passing laws banning stick shifts. Atchley believes that the new cellphone laws may be counterproductive, instilling a false sense of security, since they may lull drivers into thinking that gabbing on the hands-free phone is just fine.
"People are led to believe that as long as they have their Bluetooth wireless headset they're safe, when in fact they're probably at more risk, because now that they think that they're safe they're probably going to make more calls and be at risk for even greater periods of time," says Atchley. On the other hand, not everyone who strives to follow the new laws will bother to get a hands-free phone. "If people really don't use their cellphone because they don't have a hands-free unit, then that could actually be a good thing," Strayer says.
Researchers are already studying the impact of hands-free laws, trying to predict what the new laws will (and won't) accomplish. Jed Kolko, an economist with the Public Policy Institute of California, studied the fatality rates in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and D.C. before and after their hand-hell cellphone bans went into effect, also comparing traffic fatalities with those in states that did not implement bans. Based on his data, Kolko predicts that California will see 300 fewer traffic fatalities per year, during times of adverse driving conditions, like bad weather, because of the new hands-free law. (To put that in perspective, California has over 4,000 traffic fatalities annually.) But whether that will be because more drivers will have both hands on the wheel or because fewer drivers will be yammering on the phone while behind the wheel is anyone's guess.
For now, cops are writing tickets for talking. In the first two weeks of the law, California Highway Patrol officers wrote 2,500 tickets to drivers who continued to talk on hand-held phones in spite of the ban. To put that in perspective, the CHP writes about 45,000 tickets for speeding in the typical two-week period.
Between lobbying pressure from wireless companies and the public's predilection for talking while driving, regulation against talking on cellphones while driving remains weak, and nonexistent in many places. Yet many corporations are recognizing the liability risks of having employees talking while driving and banning the practice in their employee handbooks.
Even so, it may take decades for public concern about the problem to catch up with the ubiquity of cellphone use behind the wheel. As Atchley notes, the first drunken-driving law went on the books in 1917, yet it wasn't until the 1980s that a grass-roots movement, spearheaded by the likes of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Students Against Driving Drunk, led to wide enforcement and tougher laws. It will likely take a similar national mobilization of the aggrieved family members of people killed or maimed by drivers talking on cellphones to raise public awareness of just how dangerous it is.
As for the researchers who study driving and talking on the phone, aren't they tempted to make a few calls when they're stuck in traffic, just like the rest of us? Maybe so, says Green from the University of Michigan Transportation Institute. But when he's driving, "my phone is off," he says.
About the writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon.
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