Cell Phones Make You A Worse Driver — Taking Many Lives
Talking on the phone is dangerous. The New York Times wrote a great series of articles called Driven to Distraction to explain the science behind this. Basically, your brain keeps saying “Why do you keep looking at the road? We’re having a conversation here! David Pogue has a good article on the dangers of hands free texting as well. Yet people keep trying to put more and more distractions in their cars.
Cell Phones Also Save Some Lives — When Used In An Emergency
There was an interesting article on insurance that mentioned how cell phones saves lives:
Technology has also had a profound impact on survival post
accidents. One company we interviewed told us that, in the
late 1990s, it noticed that its losses from motor accidents had
increased substantially, but it didn’t know why.
In the end the company discovered that the advent of mobile
phones meant that accidents were reported more quickly, so
people survived more often. That is, of course, very good for
drivers, yet increasing the survivability of severely injured
motorists wrong-footed actuarial assumptions at the time.