Mobile Phones More Dangerous Than Drink Driving?
By now, all drivers ought to be aware of the dangers of drink driving, and even drug driving has recently become a commonly used term. We know that both drinking, or using inappropriate (whether illegal or over the counter) drugs while driving delays your reactions, but did you know that texting, checking your emails, or checking your social networking sites can delay your reactions even more?
When mobile phones first started to become so popular that almost everyone had one, the phone related danger in the news was making telephone calls while driving. This resulted in the advent of hands free equipment in cars, and these days, this is often a standard feature. Even so, making a hands free phone call while driving will delay your reactions by 26 per cent. As texting increased in popularity, it was discovered that reactions are slowed by 37 per cent while texting.
Texting has been in the news a few times lately as the cause of a crash, but with the advent of smartphones that can access the internet as easily as they can make a phone call, there is a new danger on the horizon.
The Transport Research Laboratory has been conducting a study on behalf of the RAC, and almost a quarter of motorists aged between 17 and 24 have admitted to checking both email and social networking sites while driving. Shockingly the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) has discovered that this practice can delay the driver’s reaction times by a massive 38 per cent. This makes it the most dangerous use of a mobile phone in the car. And yet, people are doing it.
To put this in perspective, a driver who chooses to drive while at the UK alcohol drink-drive limit will have their reactions slowed by a ‘mere’ 12 per cent. The safest thing to do, really is to switch your mobile phone off while you drive.
It is difficult to ascertain the exact numbers of road accidents caused by mobile phone use due to the impossibility of determining the exact time (to the nearest second) of the accident to compare it to the times on the phone’s log. It is all too easy for the driver to argue that they used their phone immediately after the crash, rather than immediately before it.
Despite that difficulty, government figures have attributed 1690 road accidents leading to an injury to mobile phone use between 2006 and 2010 (which figure includes 110 fatal accidents). As it is likely that there are many more accidents where the police simply can’t prove that mobile phone use is to blame, this figure is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Stopping your car takes more than well-maintained brake pads andĀ car tyre treadsĀ – the first step in the chain is the driver’s reaction, so drive sensibly; put that phone away.