Driving and speaking on your mobile

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When taxi drivers do it I am very rude to them and insist they hang up or pull over or I'll report them. Handsfree is ok tho of course.

No great surprise there. The moron in question is at that moment playing with his/her/its two favorite 'entitlement' toys at once.

I find it really relaxing and productive talking to friends while driving around. Also, it makes me feel like some sort of cyborg from the future.

my only worry? that it will crawl into my ear and take over my brane!

But I am totally paranoid in cars and freak out at everything, and thats as a passenger, so perhaps I am just mental.

xpost good point Jess. It's been suggested in studies doing this distracts your attention as much as being drunk does. Dunno about that, but it is interesting.

Mad conspiracy theory #17834.

Maybe it's similar to the difference between driving with a radio/CD coming through speakers, and driving with a walkman or portable CD directly on your ear (which I tried once and once only).

Talking is an active process, listening is passive.

There's a reason that accident rates are comparable for drunk driving and cell-phone use. They impair your concentration, and change how you respond to the road. I'm all for making it a ticketable offense to drive while using one, and refuse to answer mine.

(CHORUS: I'M AN ASSHOLE.....)

OK, I'll make a huge effort to take this amazingly legalistic, self-righteous whinge of yours seriously: There is a difference between sound which has to travel ten feet from the source to reach your ear and sound which hits your eardrum at pointblank range. Somebody who did slightly better than me at physics (20 something per cent in Form 4/Yr 10) will give you the theory (I suspect it has something to do with sound being filtered by the atmosphere and travelling in many directions), but I know I can't drive, study or operate a keyboard with headphones on but have no trouble doing any of those things with background noise. Try it for yourself.

'And its very funny when you pull up at the lights and it looks like you're talking to yourself, har! :D' You may have been kidding Trayce, but you've probasbly hit a serious point.

It's all an image thing and sorry, hands-frees just don't cut the mustard. Isn't it far better for the bloke in the next lane to see you barking managerially into a hand-held and think you're a Big Deal, than to see you talking to yourself and possibly think you're a loony or a loser?

That's the sort of thin end (sorry, that should be 'thin edge') of the wedge stuff that makes the Herald Sun or the Mail so tedious.

One being active and one being passive. When I'm driving in traffic, I barely "hear" my radio - it's secondary to the act of driving. That's not possible when talking on a cell phone.

It's about concentration.

Our drunk-driving laws aren't based on the assumption that everyone who gets behind the wheel knackered is going to get in a wreck, but that it makes them more likely to. Talking on a cell phone makes you a legitimate nuisance/threat compared to the average radio-listener (ie almost every car on the road), as being drunk makes you a legitimate nuisance/threat compared to the average sober person.

(Of course, drunk-driving and cell-phone use aren't equivalent, and shouldn't be punished the same way.)

(xpost with NZA)

How many cars have passengers? This goes in the radio-file - things that could, in their way, cause an accident but aren't a serious threat to.

Yes, one is more easily made illegal - because it's noticeable and enforcable. Just like the guy doing 15 and swerving from lane-to-lane might be stoned.

Even then, I often don't answer it.

The boss should decide which he is more anal and angsty about: Steve McQueen getting the load to its destination in the quickest time (in which case he should get off the driver's case and let him drive) or Steve absconding with it to Mexico or wherever (in which case he should sack Steve and employ someone he trusts).

As always with vexed questions re mobile phone usage, it comes back to the user's assumptions of entitlement and assumptions of necessity, which when you take a closer look at them just aren't valid.

I still hold to the argument that hands-frees aren't as distracting as hand-helds, and therefore shouldn't attract the same attention. Hand-held users: whinge for all it's worth but you're not the only folk on earth with rights.

TXTing is a whole different ballgame, assuming youre not some superman freak like Andrew who can text 1 handed without looking ;P But FFS, if youre looking at a phone and typing things in while doing 60 down the main road, what hell d'you think will happen? Ans: you'll flatten and kill a cyclist like some woman here did.

People seem to think that they HAVE to be reachable 24/7 now thanks to cells and the internet. I have a mobile, and this still shits me. Its battery is old and so a lot of the time my phone is dead/off, and my landline engaged due to net use. The amount of time people whinge at me "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!?" when they couldnt get onto me after one day!? Sheesh.

Err... bit of a rant there. Sorry.

OK, to start with it might make you feel important, the world wanting to talk to you, but surely most reasonably sane people, with within-one-standard-deviation-either-side-of-the-mean size egos, would find that novelty wearing off within, say, ten minutes?

I don't have one, though many others would prefer if I did, for reasons discussed above (esp my employers). If I did, I would take an incredibly snotty, apparently borderline-legal attitude that my mobile was like my car or my idiot box: I paid for it, it is MY property to make whatever use of, howsoever and whenever I chose. And if I choose to only ever turn it on to make a call myself, that choice is MINE.

There's another study done at the University of Utah which found that listening to the radio or conversing with passengers is not as hazardous as using a cell phone, whether it be hand-held or hands-free.

I wonder if Greg was the person (kid in the family?) driving the van or the person who smashed into the van?

On my bicycle this morning I was nearly run over by an Audi driver on a zebra crossing (with cycle lane attached) on a fairly major road. The fellow in the near lane happily stopped for me as you're meant to. The Audi driver in the next lane sort of slowed down, then carried on a bit, then juddered to a halt slap-bang on the crossing when he realised he was supposed to stop. He was clearly paying far more attention to the iphone-type thing he had in his hand than the road. Grrrrr road rage. Fortunately the first driver waited at the crossing till I'd finished my (pointless) rant at the Audi.

In other words, as mobile phones become more sophisticated, there's even more chance of drivers behaving like dickheads when using them.

As an aside, I would say that Audi drivers are a bit of a special case.

You shouldn't even be able to get your license if you can't use your phone's browser while parallel parking.

real talk, they shouild ensure people can drvtxt before sending them out there on the roads ffs