Driving Ban Needed for Cell Phone Use

Sure, you've heard the whimpering about the use of cell phones while driving.  Dangerous!  Texting?  Good God, air bags all around!  Ho hum.

Hey Mothers Against Cell Drivers!  Forget it!  The real culprit is just plain old driving.

Yep.  Driving.

Science News warns of this very real danger.  A psychologist named Gary Dell (no relation to the guy who used to make really good computers) reports that driving while using a cell phone significantly degrades cell phone performance.  Well, the cell phone does okay, but the driver really sucks at using the cell phone.

The study studied old and young drivers relaying information from the cell phone to a passenger.  The control was established by these same drivers when not driving.  They heard stories on their cell phones, like a Garrison Keillor podcast, except in Urbana, Illinois, and had to repeat those same stories to the passenger, who was still a passenger but in a car parked at, say, a Burger King.  The repeating went pretty well under the control conditions.  You know, Angelina Jolie goes to Haiti to visit traumatized children for the UN.  Sitting in one place, that's pretty much how the cell phone's story got to the passenger, except the UN was called "the frakkin' UN."

When the car was negotiating Urbana streets at a steady 30 miles an hour, the same driver heard the cell phone story and told the passenger that Angelina Jolie had divorced Brad Pitt and filmed a movie in Port au Prince, moved into a splendid Cirque tent with Sean Penn and adopted 10,000 orphaned Haitian children.  Bradgelina's lawyers stopped the car at the very next traffic light.

The driver also went completely insane keeping his BMW at 30 mph, but that was not part of the study.

By the way, it is not just cell phone ability that is compromised.  Storytelling, itself suffered.  Drivers repeated fewer story elements than passengers in the moving Toyota test.  Passengers pretty much got all the needed story elements out, while drivers could remember only the story elements of, maybe, an NBC 10 o'clock drama.

Summing up, Gary Dell said that driving is just plain dangerous for raconteurs (Garrison Keillor, again), bank executives and everyone at FOX Views.  He recommended that anyone planning a whopper (not from that Burger King) should sit the hell still.

Gary Dell further said that age didn't matter, but moving did.  Sorry, Gare, but I can guarantee that age affects moving big time.  Better recalibrate the knee part of your test.