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Driving While Talking on a Cell Phone = Driving While Drunk
2/3/2005
Live Science about that study. How did this come about? How is it becoming accepted that people who are as incapacitated by cell phone usage as people who are legally drunk with high blood alcohol, find it responsible to drive and be such menaces? Yes, the same scientists have found that people chatting on cell phones drive like people with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08 percent.What technologies are next in cars and who's going to be responsible for the damage? Well, wireless Internet, speech recognition systems, and e-mail are all slated to be in cars soon. Who's responsible for the damage they'll cause, and who asked us if we thought it was okay?
Already we hear news reports and anecdotal reports from friends about seeing people watching movies while they drive, even pornographic movies. Just last night I was followed, way too closely, for a while by a guy who had his laptop propped up on his steering wheel.
I'd like to see automobile manufacturers held responsible for the misuse of technologies put into moving vehicles. Yes, I know about "personal responsibility," but I believe that extends to understanding and being responsible for the consequences of what you do--including the design and safety of the products that you make. It d'es an innocent auto victim no good at all to have relied on the "personal responsibility" of a cell phone driver who mangles them in an accident and then hasn't the funds to recompense them.
We need standards for deciding about the appropriate use of information technology in automobiles, along with a lot of consumer behavior research to determine what people are actually going to do with those technologies. There should be a role for colleges and universities to play in that research, since few would trust such research conducted by the auto companies.
If we don't have reasonable standards, and research to back them up, well then I guess it continues to be a good thing that we're also graduating all those trial lawyers.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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