Rather than tell people that driving while on the phone is dangerous they’re sending the opposite message that driving on the phone is safe if you use this useless prophylactic.

Should we tell people to carefully wash their hypodermic needles before their share them?

That’s another good objection to outlawing cell phone use altogether while driving. No police officer would be able to tell that someone was wearing a handsfree set from outside of the vehicle. They make ‘em small enough to fit inside your ear these days.
Seems to me the current laws are a good compromise between an unenforceable ban, and ignoring the problem altogether.

It does seem rather obvious that taking your hand off the wheel to hold a phone should negatively affect your driving. It’s incredibly surprising that it doesn’t.

The other part of the BC law that I find absolutely ridiculous is the ban on skipping to the next song on your iPod while you drive. I don’t know of any study on this, but I seriously doubt that skipping to the next song on my iPod is more dangerous than skipping to the next song on a CD. Frankly the whole thing strikes me as an incredibly ill conceived law.

I also can’t see how the iPod part can be enforced AT ALL. Can anyone else? What sense does it make to enact a law that cannot be enforced?

This is nothing like seat belts. The studies have been done and the data DOES NOT support the hypothesis that hands free devices make for safer driving. The data shows this to be false.

The belief that hands free devices will improve driver safety is something that feels like it should be true, but the data proves it is not. Do you also believe that domestic violence increases on superbowl sunday?

Anyway, I decided to do some googling for you as you said you couldn’t find the study.

The reaction time study is being overshadowed at the moment because a new study was released in January and it tends to come up in the results. That one actually used insurance data rather than measuring reaction time. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10444717-266.html

But I originally was talking about studies that looked at reaction times, so without further ado…
University of Utah: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030129080944.htm

You asked me to show you a study that compares drivers conversing with passengers and ones conversing on a cell phone. The Utah research does that.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-08-13-cell-car_x.htm

That was presented to the American Psychological Association in 2006, but research on the subject goes back to 2001 as you can see in the first link.

Peter, you are arguing for a position that is flatly contradicted by the available evidence.

Read carefully:
“laws requiring hands-free devices for cell phones do NOTHING to improve public safety”

How could you possibly know this? You’re arguing that the laws governing cell phones do not improve public safety, based on a premise that the logic behind them is flawed. It may be, or it may not. There is a world of difference between having a conversation with someone (whether they are in the vehicle or not) and taking your eyes off the road to dial a number, text message someone, etc.

This reminds me of the debate about seatbelts. Shortly after the laws took effect in Ontario, traffic fatalities _increased_. It was a statistical anomaly, but all the naysayers were out in full force saying “We told you so”.
There is NO reliable data yet on the effect of handsfree laws in Canada.
You seem to have missed the distinction. Show me a study that compares accident rates between drivers who converse with a passenger in the vehicle and those who converse with someone not in the vehicle on a handsfree cell phone and I might change my mind, but I haven’t been able to find any such study anywhere.

There have been published studies on this. Furthermore, they aren’t done by looking at the effect of the laws. They’re done by simulated driving and testing reaction times. In other words, they are done by direct experiment.

As you say, the laws haven’t been in place long enough to measure results, but direct experiment is actually better. If the experiment showed that hands free devices were less distracting and didn’t cause slower reaction times, but the laws didn’t seem to reducing crashes, one could reasonably conclude that the problem is one of enforcement. Absent the experiment, one might reach the wrong conclusion.

But that’s not what the experiments show.

The experiments show that talking on the phone produces slower reaction times and more dangerous driving. This is equally the case for hand-held cell phones and ones with hands free devices. They are both equally bad.

I made the scotch/vodka comparison for a reason. Talking on the phone is bad for your driving. The BC law encourages the belief that hands free devices are “safe”. They are not.