DWS

As if there was any doubt. Sez Wired:

Driving While Stupid Ups Risk

Those sleep-deprived, multitasking drivers — clutching cell phones, fiddling with their radios or applying lipstick — apparently are involved in an awful lot of crashes.

Distracted drivers were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-crashes, says a study released Thursday by the government.

Researchers reviewed thousands of hours of video and data from sensor monitors linked to more than 200 drivers, and pinpointed examples of what keeps drivers from paying close attention to the road.

"We see people on the roadways talking on the phone, checking their stocks, checking scores, fussing with their MP3 players, reading e-mails, all while driving 40, 50, 60, 70 miles per hour and sometimes even faster," said Jacqueline Glassman, acting administrator of the government's highway safety agency.
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They found that the risk of a crash increases almost threefold when a driver is dialing a cell phone.

Some safety organizations said the study was part of a growing body of research and worried it might lead to reactionary laws.

"I urge legislators not to interpret these results as a need for new legislative initiatives. It is simply not good public policy to pass laws addressing every type of driver behavior," said Lt. Col. Jim Champagne, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association.

Y'know, we have a law against driving while talking on a cellphone here in New York, and from what I've seen on the road on literally a daily basis, everyone routinely ignores it--usually while they're careening into my lane, making a left turn into the wrong lane, or darting out from behind parked behemoths. But I digress...

For more than a year, researchers studied the behavior of the drivers of 100 vehicles in metropolitan Washington, D.C. They tracked 241 drivers, who were involved in 82 crashes of various degrees of seriousness — 15 were reported to police — and 761 near-crashes. The air bag deployed in three instances.

The project analyzed nearly 2 million miles driven and more than 43,300 hours of data.
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Assessing cell phone use, the researchers said the number of crashes or near-crashes linked to dialing the phones was nearly identical to those tied to talking or listening on the phone.

Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have laws that prohibit people from talking on handheld cell phones while driving.

A government report last year found that about 10 percent of drivers are using cell phones.

Last year, the now defunct Mobile magazine conducted a "study" I wish I had saved (or could fine an online link to) in which they took one of their editors out to a Go-Kart track and had him tool around a variety of obstructions (the kind they use in confined driving tests) while a) talking on a cellphone handset, b) talking on a hands-free cellphone thingey, and c) after getting him progressively drunk. In both a) and b) tests, the driver drive just as badly (if not worse in the case of the handset version) as being past the point of legal intoxication. So now I wonder why I bother making it a point to not drink and drive....