by Alex Yee

Created on: January 17, 2009

Living in a country (UK) that has banned cell phones (we call them mobile phones) and as a newish driver, I can say that mobile phones should be banned while driving, to an extent. When a person is driving a car there is so many pieces of information that your brain is processing: speed of your vehicle, speed of surrounding vehicles, hazard perception, road conditions, speed limits, advance warnings, steering, taking the correct route and gear changes. Now, most people may have other things on their mind, as we are not robots programmed to do one task. Usually you are thinking what are you going to do today and other random thoughts.

Now if we add a mobile phone call into the equation, firstly, if you are calling someone you need to either type in the number, look up in your phone book or speed dial. Now you may think that speed dial is pretty quick, you may take your eyes of the road for lets say a couple of seconds. Well in that time the situation could change dramatically. Now I could list a bunch of scenarios, but there are literally so many. Evidence of a second of unawareness has been demonstrated in a recent case over here in the UK when a women sneezed and did not notice a pedestrian crossing the road and the pedestrian got hit and died as a result. Dialing someone takes much longer than a sneeze especially with the fiddly controls on some phones.

Now something that makes me doubt the evolutionary theory that Charles Darwin hypothesised is that some people text (send SMS messages) whilst driving. SMS requires full or near full concentration as the button presses between unlocking your phone, opening the menu, selecting SMS, selecting compose SMS, writing your message with no spelling mistakes, selecting recipient and sending is quite a lot. This is no longer a momentary loss of concentration on the road and your surroundings but a significant loss. Here in the UK for a viral marketing campaign they wrapped lamp posts and obstacles on the streets in foam to prevent injury when texting whilst walking. Now this may have been a joke but the message is still there, you can't text and walk let alone drive! I believe if only one thing relating to mobile phones needs to banned it is texting. If I found out that if even 1% of drivers in the UK texted and drove I would be reluctant to leave my house by car, bus or on foot.

Another issue that needs to be taken into account is that when you have a phone call you may become concentrated so much on the conversation

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