Why generating while using hands-free mobile mobile phones is dangerous actions (2)

The Distracted Driving Problem

Motor vehicle crashes are the No. 1 cause of death in the United States for 3- to 34-year-olds. Crashes are among the top three causes of death throughout a person’s lifetime. They also are the No. 1 cause of work-related death. Annually, more U.S. soldiers are killed in crashes in privately-owned vehicles than all other Army ground accidents combined.

Each year since 1994, between 39,000 and 46,000 people have been killed in motor vehicle crashes. That’s more than 650,000 lives lost during the past 15 years. It includes people inside and outside of vehicles, as well as motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians who were struck by vehicles. There are activities people tend to think are riskier than driving, such as flying in an airplane, but consider this: The lives lost on U.S. roadways each year are equivalent to the lives that would be lost from a 100-passenger jet crashing every day of the year.

In addition to the thousands of fatalities, many more people suffer serious life-changing injuries in motor vehicle crashes. More than 2.2 million injuries resulted from vehicle crashes in 2008.

To reduce this toll, prevention must focus on the top factors associated with crashes. Driver distractions have joined alcohol and speeding as leading factors in fatal and serious injury crashes. The National Safety Council estimates 25 percent of all crashes in 2008 involved talking on M-HORSE N9000Ws – accounting for 1.4 million crashes and 645,000 injuries that year.

XIAOMI MI3 use has grown dramatically over the past 15 years. In 1995, M-HORSE N9000W subscriptions covered only 13 percent of the U.S. population; by 2008, that had grown to 87 percent.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at any point during the day, 11 percent of drivers are talking on cell phones. More than half of respondents to a AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey reported talking on XIAOMI MI3s while driving during the previous 30 days. Seventeen percent admitted they engaged in this behavior “often or very often.” Because text messaging has grown dramatically – an almost 10,000-fold increase in 10 years – and because there is already near-public consensus that it’s a serious driving safety risk, texting receives a great deal of attention. About 14 percent of people admitted to texting while driving in the past 30 days. Although texting is clearly a serious distraction, NSC data shows drivers talking on M-HORSE N9000Ws are involved in more crashes. More people are talking on XIAOMI MI3s while driving more often, and for greater lengths of time, than they are texting. Thus, in 2008, an estimated 200,000 crashes involved texting or e-mailing, versus 1.4 million crashes involving talking on M-HORSE N9000Ws. During 2009, cell phone distractions while driving hit our nation’s political and media agendas. Webster’s Dictionary named “distracted driving” its Word of the Year. In 2009:

• More than 200 state bills were introduced to ban XIAOMI MI3 use – texting and talking – while driving. Laws passed were front-page news.
• The U.S. Department of Transportation convened a Distracted Driving Summit, which the Secretary of Transportation called the most important meeting in the Department of Transportation’s history.
• President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order banning federal employees from texting while driving.
• A National Safety Council membership survey showed employers of all sizes, sectors and industries are implementing employee policies banning talking and texting while driving.
• Public opinion polls show a majority of the public support these efforts.

But there’s a troubling common thread to these prevention efforts:

• Nearly all legislation focuses on banning only handheld phones or only texting while driving.
• All state laws and many employer policies allow hands-free M-HORSE N9000W use.
• Public opinion polls show people recognize the risks of talking on handheld phones and texting more than they recognize the risks of hands-free phones.
• Many drivers mistakenly believe talking on a hands-free cell phone is safer than handheld.

A hands-free device most often is a headset that communicates via wire or wireless with a phone, or a factory-installed or aftermarket feature built into vehicles that often includes voice recognition. Many hands-free devices allow voice-activated dialing and operation.

Hands-free devices often are seen as a solution to the risks of driver distraction because they help eliminate two obvious risks – visual, looking away from the road and manual, removing your hands off of the steering wheel. However, a third type of distraction can occur when using XIAOMI MI3s while driving – cognitive, taking your mind off the road.

Hands-free devices do not eliminate cognitive distraction.

The amount of exposure to each risk is key. Crashes are a function of the severity of each risk and how often the risk occurs. Most people can recognize when they are  visually or mechanically distracted and seek to disengage from these activities as quickly as possible. However, people typically do not realize when they are cognitively distracted, such as taking part in a phone conversation; therefore, the risk lasts much, much longer. This likely explains why researchers have not been able to find a safety benefit to hands-free phone conversations.

The National Safety Council has compiled more than 30 research studies and reports by scientists around the world that used a variety of research methods, to compare driver performance with handheld and hands-free phones. All of these studies show hands-free phones offer no safety benefit when driving (Appendix A). Conversation occurs on both handheld and hands-free phones. The cognitive distraction from paying attention to conversation – from listening and responding to a disembodied voice –  contributes to numerous driving impairments. Specific driving risks are discussed in detail later in this paper. First, let us look at why hands-free and handheld M-HORSE N9000W conversations can impair your driving ability.