If you think you can drive safely when chatting on your hands-free mobile phone kit, then think again.
Mounting evidence reveals that hands-free mobile phone calls can significantly diminish your driving skills, in spite of claims to the contrary by equipment manufacturers.
The latest report on the dangers of hands-free mobile use comes from a long-term study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US, and comes amid calls from safety advocates that all in-car mobile phone use be banned there.
The study uncovered “negligible differences in safety relevant behaviour and performance between using a hand-held and hands-free communications devices while driving from the standpoint of cognitive distraction”.
Although the report was commissioned in 2003, the findings were only recently published by The New York Times.
The former head of the US highway safety agency told the newspaper that he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonising members of Congress who were concerned about alienating voters and the mobile phone industry.
While other studies mirror these findings, it is legal to use a hands-free mobile phone for Australians holding full driver’s licences, although the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority does urge drivers to keep their mobile conversations short and to avoid “complex or emotional” topics.
The NRMA goes a step further, advising drivers who want to make or receive a call or send a text, to pull over before using their mobiles.
“Even when you’re on a mobile hands-free, you are diverting your attention from driving and increase the risk of having a crash," NRMA Insurance spokesman John Hallal said.
Concrete data on exactly how hands-free mobile conversations can impact driving is hard to source, given the difficulty for police to prove whether a crash was caused by the use of a hands-free phone.
To address this issue, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a US non-profit research organisation funded by car insurers, undertook a study in 2005 to cross-match traffic accidents with phone billing data.
Their research was conducted in Western Australia after US phone companies declined to make customers’ billing records available.
Perth drivers who had been involved in accidents shared information on the circumstances with researchers, and their findings indicated a four-fold increase in injury crash risk from the use of mobile phones, consistent across different categories of drivers.
Anne McCartt, author of the study, said: "Male and female drivers experienced about the same increase in risk from using a phone. So did drivers older and younger than 30 and drivers using hand-held and hands-free phones."
Another Australian study, conducted by Griffith University in 2004, attempted to quantify mobile-phone risks by placing subjects in a closed-circuit driving track environment and measuring their responses to particular tasks, which demanded varying degrees of concentration.
Rod Barrett, an associate professor in physiotherapy at the university, said the study revealed that it was not only hand-held mobiles that caused problems.
“The interference you get from talking to someone not in same context as you was problematic as well,” he said.
Russell White, a driving expert who helped to conduct the 2004 study, said: “We discovered that distraction didn’t come from the type of conversation. Whether it was something light or something quite complex made no difference. It was the factor of having the chat, during which we saw changes in driving performance in terms of perception, awareness and also vehicle control. Continued…
