Calling from the car does not cause crashes: new research

No, talking on your mobile does not make you more likely to crash the car, says research from the London School of Economics and Carnegie Mellon University.

The paper, Driving under the (Cellular) Influence, published this week in the American Economic Journal, also says that laws against phoning and driving do not make the roads safer.

“Our findings may strike many as counterintuitive,” says Saurabh Bhargava, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and lead author of the paper. But he said that his research was based on real-world data, unlike most other research on the topic.

Using a mobile while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined – Saurabh Bhargava, LSE

“Using a mobile while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined,” he said.

However, the UK’s Department for Transport has disputed the findings. In the UK, talking on a hand-held phone while driving can result in a maximum fine of £1000 and a driving disqualification. A simple offence results in a £60 fine and penalty points.

The paper by Mr Bhargava and co-author Vikram Pathania from the LSE challenges a 1997 study which found that phone use at the wheel was as dangerous as drinking alcohol.

No correlation with phone use

The researchers wanted to investigate why road accidents were down, although the number of mobile phone owners has gone up sharply since 1993, and 81 per cent of drivers say they have used their phones while driving.

To test the correlation, Mr Bhargava and Mr Pathania examined a specific cache of mobile phone call data and crash data from America between 2002 to 2005, a period when most mobile carriers offered pricing plans with free calls on weekdays after 9pm.

Identifying drivers as those whose mobile calls were routed through multiple cellular towers, they first showed that drivers increased call volume by more than 8 per cent at 9pm. They then compared the relative crash rate before and after 9pm using data on approximately 8 million crashes across nine US states and all fatal crashes across the nation.

They found that the increased mobile phone use by drivers at 9pm had no corresponding effect on crash rates.

Phones ‘worse than alcohol’

But the UK’s Department for Transport disagrees with the findings, arguing that distraction of all sorts is bad for a driver, and reiterating the belief that using a phone at the wheel as bad or worse than drinking alcohol.

For example, research from the British Medical Journal in 2005 showed that a driver using a mobile phone is four times more likely to be involved in an accident. Meanwhile research for Direct Line insurance shows that drivers’ reaction times are up to 50 per cent slower than normal when driving and using a mobile phone. It also shows that reaction times are 30 per cent worse than when driving under the influence of alcohol.

“Using a mobile at the wheel is dangerous – in the last three years at least 68 lives were lost in accidents where a driver was distracted by their phone.

“We are determined to crack down on this sort of behaviour, which is why we are increasing the fixed penalty for this from £60 to £100.”