Hands free mobile driving study claim raises questions

Stan Beer
Saturday, 01 July 2006 09:22

Opinion and Analysis

If one is to believe a University of Utah study, then talking on a hands free mobile phone while driving a car is more dangerous than driving while intoxicated. This is not the first time that such suggestions have been made. However, there are some questions that need to be asked about this particular study.

The study, published in a journal called Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, prompted one of the authors, a psychology professor at University of Utah to call for the banning of all mobile phone use while driving. Assistant professor Frank Drews obviously placed great store in the results of the study conducted by his fellow researchers. However, given the size of the sample and the way the study was conducted, what is surprising is that firstly someone published it and secondly the mobile phone industry is not up in arms raising its collective voice in protest.

This was not a study based on statistics gathered from records of the tens of thousands of actual motor accidents that occur each year on US roads, as they do in many other countries. It was not even a study conducted during actual driving conditions. This so-called study used a grand total of 40 volunteers!

These volunteers were tested on a simulator - hopefully a good one. Of these 40 volunteers, three participants crashed into simulated cars in front of them while talking on a mobile phone. No participants from the same group of 40 who "drove" in the same simulated test while intoxicated with a blood alcohol reading of 0.08% had an accident.

According to the Utah study, mobile phone users were 9% slower to brake, had 24% more variation in following distance and were 19% slower to return to their initial speed after braking than undistracted drivers. Adding all this up, talking on cell phones while driving makes it 5.36 times more likely to get into an accident than not talking on a cell phone.

It's truly amazing that such mathematically explicit information can be gleaned from a study of just 40 people. What is even more amazing is that none of the study participants drunk on vodka and orange juice had an accident. Are we to conclude then that getting smashed at a party and then driving home is safer than calling our spouse from the car to let him or her know that we're on our way home from the office but we may be a little late because of heavy traffic?

We understand that the study was funded by a US$25,000 grant. Perhaps that explains why only 40 people were tested. However, this does raise some questions concerning the impartiality of the study. Strong links between alcohol intoxication and unsafe driving have been well established for many decades so any study on this topic would not even register on the research equivalent of the Richter scale. Likewise, common sense dictates that driving with one hand on a steering wheel while talking on a phone does not exactly conjure up conditions for safe driving.

However, if researchers can establish a connection between hands-free mobile phone use and the increased incidence of motor accidents, then that is big news. It's almost as big as the suspected linkages between mobile phone use and brain tumours were in the 1990s! It may lead to funding for even bigger and more comprehensive studies. Is it beyond the pale to suggest that perhaps the Utah study set out to prove that such a connection exists and therefore the test conditions were tailored to that end? Were there, for instance, any tests done during the study concerning conversations conducted by a driver with other passengers in a vehicle? Surely evidence can be found to suggest that parents talking to their children, their spouses or friends while driving could increase the risk of accidents?

That last point raises another interesting question. If a team of researchers do happen to get some serious money to do a more comprehensive study on hands free mobile phone use in automobiles, perhaps they should make it a point to compare hands free mobile phone conversations to the effects of conversations with passengers while driving. If such a study happened to find that conversations with passengers did significantly increase the risk of accidents, would the author of the subsequent research report call for laws banning conversations with passengers?