Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.

Look, I know this is “Too Long for Tumblr.” But this is important enough that I wanted to make sure that I passed it on, in the hopes that you will pass it on in whatever form you find helpful.

Remember the other day when I said:

Just remember, a vote for the the wonderfully “pro-life” Republicans is a vote for war and AIDS.

And you know how anti-science the whole Bush era was? And you know how a lot of people didn’t care because they thought it was just stem cells, abortion, and global warming that they were being protected from?

Well it turns out there’s all sorts of fun stuff that gets suppressed when you start suppressing scientific research.

Like a study that was never done to followup on pretty good evidence that talking on a cell while driving (even “hands free”) is dangerous. Why? Because your brain is engaged, not just your hands.

I’ve made this argument for a long time, and almost every time I make it someone will say “Well there’s never been any proof…”

Turns out there wasn’t any proof because the people who were in charge of the “proof finding” were pressured into not doing a study if the results were going to upset the Republican held Congress back in 2003.

So for six years we haven’t had this data.

There’s a full story on the New York Times’ website: Drive To Distraction found via the Daring Fireball Linked List.

Hit the link for the full story. I’ve excerpted pieces here and added “the Republican held” before the word “Congress” as the story takes place in 2003, which may have been the zenith of Republican strangehold on this country in the past decade.

U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving

By MATT RICHTEL

In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel. They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.

But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering [the Republican held] Congress.

[edit]

The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of [the Republican held] Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states.

Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking.

“We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety.

Re-read that last sentence, because we’re going to come back to it in just a few moments.

[edit]

The researchers also shelved a draft letter they had prepared for Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to send, warning states that hands-free laws might not solve the problem.

That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers’ focus off the road, studies showed.

The research mirrors other studies about the dangers of multitasking behind the wheel. Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.

Pause.

Re-read that last paragraph please.

Four times more likely to crash.

As likely to cause an accident as someone who is legally drunk.

[edit]

Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of the highway safety agency, said he grudgingly decided not to publish the Mineta letter and policy recommendation because of larger political considerations.

At the time, [the Republican held] Congress had warned the agency not to use its research to lobby states. Dr. Runge said transit officials told him he could jeopardize billions of dollars of its financing if [the Republican held] Congress perceived the agency had crossed the line into lobbying.

[edit]

Not all the research went unpublished. The safety agency put on its Web site an annotated bibliography of more than 150 scientific articles that showed how a cellphone conversation while driving taxes the brain’s processing power, impairing reaction time. But the bibliography included only a list of the articles, not the one-page summaries of each one written by the researchers.

Chris Monk, who researched the bibliography for 18 months, said the exclusion of the summaries took the teeth out of the findings.

“It became almost laughable,” Mr. Monk said. “What they wound up finally publishing was a stripped-out summary.”

The difference between a bibliograph and an annotated bibliography is the difference between something that gets read and something that doesn’t.

You really ought to read the whole article because I’ve left out some important parts for the sake of brevity.

In 2003 I was in the worst car accident I’ve ever been in. Fortunately it wasn’t too bad. I was pulling out of a parking lot, looked left, saw that it was clear, looked right, the cars were stopped and the driver (who was going to turn into the parking lot I was going to come out of), waved me on.

I pulled out and was immediately hit by a teenager on a cell phone traveling about 50MPH on a narrow, winding road. Fortunately she only hit the front bumper of my month-old car.

A few seconds later she would have hit the driver’s side door.

I was found at fault for the accident because I was entering the flow of traffic. I remain convinced that had she been paying full attention to driving, she could have made the incredibly slight course correction necessary, or at least reached for her horn.

When I mentioned this to the cop who showed up to take the report he said, “It’s not illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving. People do it all the time.”

(Note: I have since noticed that at least 95% of the time I see a police officer in his/her cruiser, they are on a cell phone.)

That same year, the Republican held Congress was so powerful that they intimidated people into not doing more research about the dangers of using cell phones while driving.

I can’t do anything about that. Hopefully more study will now be done.

But I can do this: I can encourage you to minimize the time spent on the phone while driving. Accidents are avoided by a matter of fractions of seconds’ worth of reaction time. Sometime they are unavoidable. But sometimes they are.

One last time I’ll repeat the quote from above:

Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.