Cell Phone hazards

How cell phone is affecting us socially.

Kazi Mehdi Rahman
ID-1210910030
English-105, Section 7
Abdus Selim
December 10, 2013
How cell phone is affecting us socially.

Perhaps you have had one of those moments when you look around in a crowded public place and it seems that everyone is either talking or tapping a message on a cell phone. Older individuals might wonder how things ever became this way, but for younger mobile phone users, this is the norm and all they’ve ever known. Cell phones, texting and smart phone application are here to stay and have changed society in important ways, for better and worse. When a cell phone goes off in a classroom or at a concert, we are irritated, but at least our lives are not endangered. When we are on the road, however, irresponsible cell phone users are more than irritating: They are putting our lives at risk. Many of us have witnessed drivers so distracted by dialing and chatting that they resemble drunk drivers, weaving between lanes, for example, or nearly running down pedestrians in crosswalks. Cell phones have increased the likelihood of traffic accidents and proven to damage young people communication skills. So we need to educate the public about the dangers of driving while phoning and also change the habit of the youngsters of using abbreviated text words. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that texting and driving is dangerous. But plenty of people continue to do it. Most troubling: even with all the stories of tragic car accidents happening as a direct result of distracted driving, teens and adults are still texting at the wheel. According to Kristin Marino (2012) text messaging increases the likelihood of accident by 23 times, the minimal amount of time a person is distracted from road is 5 seconds, in 2011, at least 23% of the car collisions involved cell phones, 13% of drivers at the age of 18-20 involved in car accidents admitted that texting or talking on mobile phone was the reason for their car crash. No One can deny that cell phones have caused traffic deaths and injuries. Cell phones were implicated in three fatal accidents in November 1999 alone. Early in November, two-year-old Morgan Pena was killed by a driver distracted by his cell phone. Morgan’s mother, Patti Pena, reports that the driver “ran a stop sign at 45 mph, broadsided my vehicle and killed Morgan as she sat in her car seat.” A week later, corrections officer Shannon Smith, who was guarding prisoners by the side of the road, was killed by a woman distracted by a phone call Besthoff (2001). On Thanksgiving weekend that same month, John and Carole Hall were killed when a Naval Academy midshipman crashed into their parked car. The driver said in court that when he looked up from the cell phone he was dialing; he was three feet from the car and had no time to stop Stockwell (2000). The scientific literature on the dangers of driving while sending a text message from a mobile phone, or texting while driving, is limited. A simulation study at the Monash University Accident Research Centre has provided strong evidence that both retrieving and, in particular, sending text messages has a detrimental effect on a number of critical driving tasks. Specifically, negative effects were seen in detecting and responding correctly to road signs, detecting hazards, time spent with eyes off the road, and (only for sending text messages) lateral position. Surprisingly, mean speed, speed variability, lateral position when receiving text messages and following distance showed no difference(Hosking, Simon; Kristie Young, Michael Regan. A separate, yet unreleased simulation study at the University of Utah found a six fold increase in distraction-related accidents when texting.
The low number of scientific studies may be indicative of a general assumption that if talking on a mobile phone increases risk, then texting also increases risk, and probably more so. Market research by Pinger, a company selling a voice-based alternative to texting reported that 89% of U.S. adults think that text messaging while driving is "distracting, dangerous and should be outlawed." The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has released polling data that show that 87% of people consider texting and e-mailing while driving a "very serious" safety threat, almost equivalent to the 90% of those polled who consider drunk driving a threat. Despite the acknowledgement of the dangers of texting behind the wheel, about half of drivers 16 to 24 say they have texted while driving, compared with 22 percent of drivers 35 to 44.
Texting while driving received greater attention in the late 2000s, corresponding to a rise in the number of text messages being sent. Over a year approximately 2,000 teens die from texting while driving. Texting while driving attracted interest in the media after several highly publicized car crashes were caused by texting drivers, including a May 2009 incident involving a Boston trolley car driver who crashed while texting his girlfriend. Texting was blamed in the 2008 Chatsworth train collision which killed 25 passengers. Investigations revealed that the engineer of that train had sent 45 text messages while operating.
On July 27, 2009, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute released preliminary findings of their study of driver distraction in commercial vehicles. Two studies, comprising about 200 haul trucks driving 3 million combined miles, used video cameras to observe the drivers and road; researchers observed "4,452 safety-critical events, which includes crashes, near crashes, crash-relevant conflicts, and unintended lane deviations." 81% of the safety critical events had some type of driver distraction. Text messaging had the greatest relative risk, with drivers being 23 times more likely to experience a safety-critical event when texting. The study also found that drivers typically take their eyes off the forward roadway for an average of four out of six seconds when texting, and an average of 4.6 out of the six seconds surrounding safety-critical events.

Reference:
1. http://www.onlineschools.com/in-focus/driving-while-intexticated
2. Stockwell, Jamie. “Phone Use Faulted in Collision.” Washington Post 6 Dec. 2000: B1+. Print.
3. Besthoff, Len. “Cell Phone Use Increases Risk of Accidents, but
Users Willing to Take the Risk.” WRAL.com. Capitol
Broadcasting, 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 12 Jan. 2001.
4. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070714/NEWS01/707140333&template=printart
5. http://gizmodo.com/286731/89-of-americans-want-texting-while-driving-outlawed
6. http://www.monash.edu.au/miri/research/reports/muarc246.pdf
7. Hanowski, Richard (June 3, 2009). "Driver Distraction in Commercial Vehicle Operations". Retrieved 2009-07-28.
8.