Cell Phone Dangerous to Motorcycles

I think the evidence is that telephone conversations by a person driving a car lead to more accidents than conversations with other passengers. The question now is why? The answer may be psychological.

Not all conversations are the same. Some, depending on the topic and the relationship to the other person can be far more distracting. It is also possible to have a conversation where one party is not paying any attention at all to the conversation. Come, on now, doesn't everybody do this or is it just me?

If you are sitting in the passenger seat, talking to the driver, do you ever get annoyed because they are not looking at you, or because they are paying attention to something else while conversing with you? I didn't think so. Certainly not the same as talking to someone playing a video game at home. You, along with almost every other passenger (other than an infant for example) will make allowances for the driver doing that job of driving, which you realize is all that is standing between you and instant death. But many cell phone conversations take place without the other party being aware they are talking to someone driving a car. And there is no rule where you must let the other person know you are driving a car, though a few people have apparently taken up the habit. This also helps explain why a CB radio is not as much of a problem, as the receiver assumes you may be driving.

When you are talking to a passenger sitting in the car, the passenger will not spend all their time gazing adoringly into your ear, they will look at the road a lot too. And they can kind of sense when things are slack, and when they are challenging. People are good at picking up both subtle cues from your white knuckles on the steering wheel, to the sight of single digits being waved by passing drivers. So they tone down, if not pause the conversation to let you handle it, and sometimes even help by screaming "we're all gonna die!!" at the appropriate time after noticing a truck bearing down on you from the side.

Not so when you are discussing something with an unwary cell phone conversationalist. Who may be your ex-wife discussing the latest problem regarding your child support payments or custody arrangement. Or may be a customer explaining why the last delivery needs to be returned for full credit. During these demanding conversations, you may be missing certain cues on the road, road signs, forks in the road, or dead stopped traffic up ahead. Your conversational partners are sitting safe at home or work, engaged in an emotional conversation with you, and are highly aware of any slight rudeness on your part. Which you are trying to avoid to the point of putting the driving in second place in your attention queue.

When an emergency situation comes up, ideally you would throw the phone down and focus on avoiding the accident. But when the situation comes up, you do not know what your reaction will be. Would you first blurt out "Got to let you go for a second, there Bill, there's a car that just missed the red light and is heading my way!" and then put the phone down in a secure spot. Of course, you have now just wasted 2 seconds of valuable reaction time where you should have already started coming up with a plan to avoid the accident and putting it into effect.

All this has nothing to do with "hands free", or whether you are looking at the road or not. Drivers who are distracted may look directly at, but still not "see", a motorcycle for example. This can happen because their brain is programmed to look for a typical car and respond appropriately, but the sight of a motorcycle triggers a second verification cycle that the brain must perform before it accepts that this is a motorcycle, which should be treated as a car. Just like the cashier at the store needs to do a price check on an unfamiliar item. But if the key part of the brain is temporarily busy with a cell phone call, the request for the motorcycle verification goes on hold for a few seconds, and that's actually all the time it takes for the driver to intersect the motorcycle's path.