Friday, Jul 4, 2008
There are no reliable statistics for how many car accidents are linked to cellphone gabbing. But according to a 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, drivers using the devices are four times more likely to suffer a crash -- about the same increased risk as getting behind the wheel after downing one too many martinis.
Moreover, according to Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, it is estimated that between 600 and 1,000 people a year die in cellphone related crashes. In the future, he says, that figure is expected to hit 2,000 as more people subscribe and then take to the road.
"We're bringing more and more toys into our vehicles," says Frances Bents, a co-author of the NHTSA cellphone report and a vice president of Dynamic Science Inc., a consulting company that conducts health and safety research. "There are a lot of people who are going to die before we fully understand what kind of problem we've created."
So far only six states -- Minnesota, Oklahoma, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Tennessee -- have implemented a policy of tracking whether cellphones are implicated in crashes. And even officials involved in collecting the data acknowledge that it's extremely difficult to determine how often a phone is to blame and that the actual incidence is far greater than reported.
In Minnesota, for example, cellphones and CB radios were identified as being responsible for just 0.3 percent of the more than 2,500 single vehicles accidents for 30- to 34-year-olds in 1999. But Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Cathy Clark says that the data does not reflect the realities of the road.
"The reason is that most drivers who are talking on their cellphones and are involved in a crash are not going to admit to law enforcement when they're doing it," she says. And unless there is a witness who saw the driver using a cellphone, adds Clark, it most likely gets coded under "inattentive driving" -- the No. 1 recorded cause of accidents in Minnesota.
To promote the idea of passing legislation to restrict the practice, politicians and traffic safety advocates have paraded the stories of the wounded and the dead before the public to show what happens when you mix cellphones and driving -- what many now consider a deadly cocktail. Celebrity-hungry media outlets, of course, have been eager to comply.
These "poster children" for the crusade include 2-year-old Morgan Lee Pena, killed last year by a cellphone-using driver; Ron Silber, who can no longer walk unaided; and John Michael and Carole Hall, who one day last year pulled over to the shoulder of the road to let their 10-year-old go to the bathroom. While they were sitting in their Mazda waiting for him, Jason Jones, a 20-year-old Naval Academy student returning home from his girlfriend's house, slammed into the car, killing them.
Jones was on his cellphone while traveling at a high rate of speed, according to prosecutors who pressed a manslaughter charge. Photos taken at the scene of the accident show his car with the cellphone plugged into the cigarette lighter even after the accident, said Michael Herman, assistant state attorney for Prince George's County, Md. Jones' attorney did not return a phone call seeking comment.
"The defendant admitted that he was dialing on the cellphone and all of a sudden he looked up and 'boom,'" says Herman. "We believe strongly that the Hall family were innocent victims of a very avoidable collision that was caused by the gross negligence of the defendant, and that meets the legal criteria of manslaughter."
Jones pleaded not guilty to the manslaughter charge, which could have netted him 20 years in prison. Even though Jones wasn't convicted on the manslaughter charge, sources close to the case say that the state attorney used the case to to nudge Maryland legislators to pass a law restricting the practice.
The Halls were from East Northport, N.Y., a town in Long Island's Suffolk County; they were passing through Maryland on their way back from a Thanksgiving celebration in Virginia. Their death so rocked Suffolk, a region with 1.4 million residents and the home of the Hamptons, that officials there passed legislation in October banning the use of handheld cellphones in a moving car. Hands-free devices will still be permitted. This is anything -- from an ear piece to a speaker-phone adapter -- that allows you to use the cellphone without holding it in your hand.
"Hopefully, it will heal the wound," says Jon Cooper, the legislator who wrote the bill. "Another aspect of the law is that Suffolk County is sending a message to cellphone manufacturers and carmakers about all these other gadgets that they're sending our way. The message is this: Go ahead and improve our lives, but consider the implications of your products on highway safety."
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