Essay About Regulate Use Of Cell Phones And Farmers Insurance Group

A Call to Action – Regulate Use of Cell Phones on the Road
Essay Preview: A Call to Action – Regulate Use of Cell Phones on the Road
Report this essay
A Call to Action:
Regulate Use of Cell Phones on the Road
When a cell phone goes off in a classroom or at a concert, we
are irritated, but at least our lives are not endangered. When we
are on the road, however, irresponsible cell phone users are more
than irritating: They are putting our lives at risk. Many of us have
witnessed drivers so distracted by dialing and chatting that they
resemble drunk drivers, weaving between lanes, for example, or
nearly running down pedestrians in crosswalks. A number of bills to
regulate use of cell phones on the road have been introduced in
state legislatures, and the time has come to push for their passage.
Regulation is needed because drivers using phones are seriously
impaired and because laws on negligent and reckless driving are
not sufficient to punish offenders.
No one can deny that cell phones have caused traffic deaths
and injuries. Cell phones were implicated in three fatal accidents in
November 1999 alone. Early in November, two-year-old Morgan
Pena was killed by a driver distracted by his cell phone. Morgans
mother, Patti Pena, reports that the driver “ran a stop sign at 45
mph, broadsided my vehicle and killed Morgan as she sat in her car
seat.” A week later, corrections officer Shannon Smith, who was
guarding prisoners by the side of the road, was killed by a woman
distracted by a phone call (Besthoff). On Thanksgiving weekend
that same month, John and Carole Hall were killed when a Naval
Academy midshipman crashed into their parked car. The driver said
in court that when he looked up from the cell phone he was dial-
ing, he was three feet from the car and had no time to stop
(Stockwell B8).
Expert testimony, public opinion, and even cartoons sug-
gest that driving while phoning is dangerous. Frances Bents, an
expert on the relation between cell phones and accidents, esti-
mates that between 450 and 1,000 crashes a year have some
connection to cell phone use (Layton C9). In a survey published
by Farmers Insurance Group, 87% of those polled said that cell
phones affect a drivers ability, and 40% reported having close
calls with drivers distracted by phones. Many cartoons have
depicted the very real dangers of driving while distracted (see
Fig. 1).
Scientific research confirms the dangers of using phones
while on the road. In 1997 an important study appeared in the
New England Journal of Medicine. The authors, Donald Redelmeier
and Robert Tibshirani, studied 699 volunteers who made their cell
phone bills available in order to confirm the times when they
had placed calls. The participants agreed to report any nonfatal
collision in which they were involved. By comparing the time of
a collision with the phone records, the researchers assessed the
dangers of driving while phoning. The results are unsettling:
We found that using a cellular telephone was associ-
ated with a risk of having a motor vehicle collision
that was about four times as high as that
among the same drivers when they were not using
their cellular telephones. This relative risk is similar
to the hazard associated with driving with a blood
alcohol level at the legal limit. (456)
The news media often exaggerated the latter claim (“similar
to” is not “equal to”); nonetheless, the comparison with drunk
driving suggests the extent to which cell phone use while driving
can impair judgment.
A 1998 study focused on Oklahoma, one of the few states to
keep records on fatal accidents involving cell phones. Using police
records, John M. Violanti of the Rochester Institute of Technology
investigated the relation between traffic fatalities in Oklahoma and
the use or presence of a cell phone. He found a ninefold increase
in the risk of fatality if a phone was being used and a doubled risk
simply when a phone was present in a vehicle (522-23). The latter
statistic is interesting, for it suggests that those who carry phones
in their cars may tend to be more negligent (or prone to distrac-
tions of all kinds) than those who do not.
Some groups have argued that state traffic laws make
legislation regulating cell phone use unnecessary. Sadly, this is not
true. Laws on traffic safety vary from state to state, and drivers
distracted by cell phones can get off with light punishment even
when