Talk away, sister.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the ol' iTunes shuffle, current selection "Jesus Walking On the Water" by The Violent Femmes:

Here we go again. Another highly slanted crap “study” purporting to show how dangerous it is to talk on the cell phone while driving. Cue the Moron Choir’s tired, scratchy refrain about how cell phone usage in cars should be banned.

First Coffee^SM will listen to pleas to ban cell phone usage while driving once roadside ads, rubbernecking at wreck sites, drive-through fast food, driving while tired, driving after taking prescription drugs, car audio systems, talking to passengers, looking at scenery and loose objects in cars, easily distractable and generally flat-out stupid people driving are all banned, since every honest study that’s ever been done shows all of those cause far, far more accidents than cell phone usage.

Prescription drugs alone cause one-third of all accidents. One third! That’s the same percentage caused by people under the influence of pot, coke, heroin and alcohol combined. You’d think people more interested in auto safety than political agendas would be clamoring to ban prescription drug usage while driving, an activity which is perfectly legal in all 50 states. No protest on the horizon that First Coffee^SM can see.

But that isn’t as sexy for cheapjack politicians and bureaucrats angling for face time on the local news, or the prune-lipped safety Nazis who dream of laws prohibiting motorcycles, bicycles, driving, eating, walking and breathing.

The Associated Press article reporting the “study” starts out “Drivers using cellular phones are four times as likely to get into a crash that can cause injuries serious enough to send them to the hospital, said an insurance study released Tuesday.”

Note that, “insurance study.” Can you guess what the “study” will “find?” Let’s continue.

Second paragraph: “Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests that using a hands-free device instead of a hand-held phone while behind the wheel will not necessarily improve safety. The institute [an organization completely funded by the auto insurance industry, a fact the reporter doesn’t point out] said it was the first attempt to estimate whether phone use increases the risk of an injury crash in automobiles.”

My, my. Everybody stop using cell phones in the car, right? Let’s read on.

Further down we find that the “study” was published in the British Medical Journal. But… this did study Americans, right? That’s why it was conducted by an American institute, fobbed off as being relevant to American cell phone usage and given big play in the American media, right?

… counting down, eighth, ninth… tenth paragraph, long after most readers have moved on to the sports page, we find the “study” examined “456 drivers in Perth, Western Australia, who owned or used mobile phones and were in a crash that put them in a hospital emergency room between April 2002 and July 2004.”

Ah. As we all know, of course, western Australia is so like urban America the study’s results can be assumed to be identical to a similar study conducted here, right? Puh-leeze. And see if this methodology makes any sense to you, First Coffee^SM can’t figure it out:

“Each driver's cell phone usage during a 10-minute interval prior to the accident was compared to use during at least one earlier period when no accident occurred. Each driver, in effect, served as his or her own control group in the study.”

What that seems to be saying is that of some drivers who had crashed who happened to be talking on cell phones in the ten minutes prior to their crash, these same drivers at earlier times were not talking on the cell phones and didn’t crash… no indication of how frequently they drove talking on the cell phone without crashing, or how many crashes overall are caused by cell phone usage, which to First Coffee^SM would be two salient point of any worthwhile study.

First Coffee^SM is also curious how studying people who crashed once while talking on cell phones after not crashing while talking on cell phones before leads to the conclusion that talking on cell phones makes one “four times” as likely to crash. Where did that number come from given the methodology – “his or her own control group,” remember – used?

Much further down in the article, three paragraphs from the end, where nobody except columnists fisking the article read, we find “Many studies examining cell phone use in vehicles have been based on police reports, but critics say the records are unreliable because it is difficult to corroborate whether a driver was using a phone.”

The critics have a point. Police reports from the Florida state highway patrol show that 1 in every 700 crashes is due to cell phone usage, a statistic nobody on either side of the debate believes, but that’s what the police reports say.

The article does mention the intriguing stat that “a survey released earlier this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 8 percent of drivers, or 1.2 million people, were using cell phones during daylight hours last year. It represented a 50 percent increase since 2002.”

It’s not mentioned whether there’s been a corresponding increase in accidents, or how many of those 1.2 million got in wrecks because of their cell phone usage.

First Coffee^SM would bet not many. A HealthScout study done in 2001 found the following ranking of which distractions caused accidents:

1. Outside distractions, such as a eye-catching advertisement or eyeing another accident, 19.7 percent.
2. Eating and drinking, 18.8 percent.
3. Fiddling with the car audio system, 11.4 percent.
4. Chatting with other passengers, 9.4 percent.
5. Trying to retrieve loose objects rolling about the car, 3.2 percent.
6. Cell phone usage, 1.5 percent.

And in 2003 the largest study to date – 4,500 Americans, not a few hundred fair dinkum Aussies – the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles in conjunction with Virginia Commonwealth University found the ordering of factors causing driver distraction bad enough to cause an accident to be first rubbernecking (largely at accident sites themselves), secondly driver fatigue, thirdly looking at scenery or landmarks, fourthly passenger or child distractions, fifthly adjusting the radio, tape or CD player, and sixthly cell phone use.

Another researcher found that one-third of all accidents are caused by drivers addled from prescription drugs – repeat: 33 percent of all accidents are caused by prescription drugs, the same percentage caused by drivers under the influence of illegal drugs and alcohol combined. Good luck banning prescription drug usage before driving.

So if you’re serious about driving safety instead of brainless fact-free grandstanding, first ban all the other factors that cause more accidents than cell phones, then come and take First Coffee^SM’s cell phone away.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content. None, zip, nada. We don’t talk on a cell phone while writing this, either.