Hands-free cellphone may be legal but still unsafe

Apr 02, 2010

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Wheels columnist

Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? Yes, you can. Can you drive a car and talk on a hands-free phone simultaneously? If you think so, you’re wrong.

That’s not just my opinion, but the conclusion of a new report by the U.S. National Safety Council (NSC), which compiled 30 studies, including one from Transport Canada. The bottom line: It’s not the telephone that’s the problem, it’s the call.

Ontario’s toothless ban on hand-held phones only eliminated the initial weaving as drivers struggled to stay in their lanes while dialling. It didn’t solve the problem of driver inattention, which lasts the entire length of the call.

What the NSC study found is that, while we pride ourselves on being able to “multi-task,” that’s not what we’re actually doing. The brain doesn’t do two things at once. Rather, it performs one task at a time, rapidly switching back and forth between them. You can’t pay attention to the call and to the road simultaneously; instead, your brain shifts its focus between the two. This results in inattention blindness: The driver is looking at red lights, pedestrians and other vehicles, but isn’t actually seeing them. This switching back and forth also results in longer reaction time, which can be the difference between stopping for the child running out on the road, or running into him.

Inattention blindness is real. I experienced it, the one and only time I talked on a cellphone while driving. After I finished my four-minute call, I realized that I couldn’t remember where I’d been. I knew I’d gone through a traffic light, but couldn’t recall if it had been red or green. Ever since, if I can’t pull over and stop safely, callers have to leave a message. No phone call takes precedence over piloting two tonnes of steel safely through traffic.

So, argues the pro-phone crowd, why isn’t talking to your passenger equally problematic? The study found that drivers on cellphones still make more driving errors than those talking to their passengers. People in your car tend to shut up if it’s obvious a situation demands your attention, and will often help by commenting on traffic (or, if it’s me in the right-hand seat, slamming the imaginary brake pedal to the floor). If you stop talking, your passenger understands that you need to concentrate on driving, whereas your telephone caller will further distract you by asking why you’ve gone silent. Studies also show that drivers listening to the radio have better response times than cellphone talkers, leading researchers to conclude that it’s the voice communication that takes your attention off the road.

And even if passengers do cause inattention, so what? By that logic, the telephone crowd shouldn’t have a problem with decriminalizing drunk driving, because studies show that the reaction times of drivers on cellphones don’t differ all that much from those who are impaired. Cellphones shouldn’t be considered acceptable just because they’re not the only thing vying for your attention.

Transport Canada’s study was a comparison of where drivers look while talking on hands-free devices. Drivers on the phone looked through a significantly smaller portion of the windshield, and looked less, or not at all, at traffic signals, other vehicles, their mirrors and the instrument cluster. The NSC study found that an estimated 50 per cent of motorists on the phone look at, but fail to process, up to half the information essential for safe driving. When the brain does realize something’s wrong, it’s often too late to avoid a crash.

Sadly, I don’t see this getting any better, not as long as lawmakers say it’s still okay to use the Bluetooth button in the car, or the parasitic bauble clipped to your ear. They didn’t even have enough spine to attach demerit points to the hand-held law, so I’m not holding my breath.

All I can hope is that people think about safety — if not that of the strangers in other cars, then of themselves and the families they’re carrying in their own vehicles. If you can’t think of any call that was more important than those lives, it’s time to hang up the receiver and make driving your full-time job.

Freelance writer Jil McIntosh can be reached at

jil@ca.inter.net