Teach drivers cellphone skills, say researchers

Researchers want the Government to consider introducing special driving licence endorsements for using cellphones in cars rather than banning them outright.

They say communications skills learned by airline pilots could be taught by driving schools to those who need to use cellphones at the wheel for business or other purposes.

A joint study conducted by Lincoln University near Christchurch and Bentley College in the United States, using a computerised simulator, measured the driving prowess of 56 pilots against that of 55 non-aviators.

Professor Jake Rose, of Lincoln's Centre of Accounting Education and Research, said that members of both groups showed equivalent driving performances when not in conversation, either with a passenger or on a cellphone.

But when talking on hands-free cellphones, non-aviators suffered 4 1/2 times as many life-threatening accidents as when not conversing.

Pilots, on the other hand, were less than twice as likely to have crashes during phone conversations and were almost at no greater risk talking to passengers.

This compared with about twice the risk non-pilots faced talking to people in the same vehicle.

The researchers did not study the use of hand-held phones, but Professor Rose said Australian statistics showed a four times higher risk when using either these or hands-free equipment at the wheel.

He said he would never use a cellphone while driving "after all the research we have been doing watching people running over pedestrians and crashing cars in the simulator".

But many businesses stood to suffer financially from banning phones in cars, he said, and it might be better to consider how to lessen the danger through driver training.

"Sometimes prohibition isn't the best option.

"We concluded that it was the conversation, not the technology, that was to blame, and because of this, we can teach people how better to deal with conversation while driving."

Professor Rose said that because phone conversations lacked key non-verbal cues available in close-contact dialogue, drivers used up significant "imaginative" resources to compensate, at the cost of losing concentration for the road ahead.

He said pilots tended to avoid this by not trying to visualise those at the other end of a phone, keeping safe driving paramount and making conversation a secondary priority.

The research, to be reported in this month's edition of international publication Risk Analysis, comes as the Ministry of Transport finalises a study on driver distractions for recommendations to the new Government on whether to ban cellphones or other driving hazards.

At least 17 people were killed in road crashes blamed on cellphones in the seven years to 2004.