Careless talk costs lives

The latest road accident figures released yesterday show a welcome improvement - but there is a sting in the tale. There was a 1% decline in road deaths overall in 2002 despite a 6% rise in deaths resulting from drinking while driving.

But the figures conceal some critical trends because there is no mention of deaths or accidents resulting from using mobile phones while driving. This is not a conspiracy, it is simply because there is no category to put them into so they are buried in the overall statistics.

Nearly all of the research shows that driving while using a mobile phone, even if it is of the hands-free variety, greatly increases the chances of an accident. The government has said that driving while using a hand-held model will be illegal from December but is exempting hands-free models because of the difficulty of enforcing the rules.

In other words it is allowing a new technology to be used that it knows will cause accidents and deaths just because there are enforcement difficulties. Why doesn't it do the same for heroin and cocaine?

This is a major victory for the mobile phone lobby and will give the green light for explosive growth both in hands-free models that are embedded in the car and for standard mobile phones connected by Bluetooth technology to a receiver in your ear without wires.

If the government does not believe the research then it should say so and publish a refutation. But if it believes the research is valid then it is doing something that is highly likely to result in a significant rise in deaths and accidents in future.

The government may even open itself to legal claims from the victims of accidents caused by drivers losing control of their vehicles while being on the phone because it knew the dangers in advance but refused to do anything about it.

How strong is the evidence? Pretty devastating. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has collated a lot of it (see below) but the research that changed my mind was done by the Transport Research Laboratory. It tested groups using handhelds and hands-free models against a comparable sample of drivers who had imbibed alcohol to the maximum permitted legal level in the UK.

The critical finding was that "phone use impaired drivers' abilities to respond to warnings more so than alcohol". The report adds: "Drivers found it easier to drive drunk than to drive while using a phone, even when it was hands-free."

If this conclusion is true then the government is doing the equivalent of allowing drivers to drive while drunk and get away with it. I have not seen any research contradicting this - only the pathetic response that it is unenforceable.

Oh really? If a policeman finds someone driving while talking to themselves might that not be prima facie evidence of driving with a hands-free? If there has been an accident then as things will stand the police won't necessarily inquire about the relevance of a hands-free set that happens to be there because no specific offence (as opposed to the general one of driving without due care and attention) will have been committed.

Yet, unlike other offences, it is actually easy to establish whether the driver was on the phone at the time of the accident because the time and duration of the conversation would have been recorded.

Even if these factors were not present there would still be a compelling reason to outlaw driving with hands-free models. It is simply that if it were illegal then others in the car would know that and be in a position to influence the driver just as they do with drinking and driving. And the driver himself would know he was doing something illegal and that his passengers knew as well.

Britain has a good record of reducing serious road accidents even though traffic is increasing - but everyone who has studied it knows that further deaths could be avoided at a fraction of the cost it takes to save lives on the railways. Now the government is ensuring that any continuing downward trend in casualties will be offset by a rise in mobile phone-related accidents and deaths that is totally avoidable.