Distracted Driving Kills Hands Free Devices Useless

Another article in this Sunday's The Washington Post highlighted once again the extreme dangers of using hand-held telecom devices while driving.  Fully 80% of the DC area drivers polled reported seeing incidents of distracted driving - a big surge in the last five years.  Not surprisingly, most people feel that they themselves have the unique ability to effectively "multi-task" -- that is -- use their portable devices and drive safely at the same time.  The sad truth of the matter however, based upon a mountain of empirical studies, shows that no one has the ability to multi-task - especially while driving.  In fact, those same studies show that even when so-called "hands free" bluetooth and similar evices are employed so that both hands can remain on the wheel, the level of distraction remains the same.  In other words, in the case of mobile phone calls, hands free devices simply do no good.  It isn't the use of one hand that's the problem - its the focusing of one's attention on the phone conversation.  Texting and surfing the web, of course, present different but equaly dangeroius issues.  By diverting both the mind and the visial attention away from driving, the dangers are even greater.  We all owe it to ourselves to take these studies seriously, and cease communicating once and for all when we are on the road.  We aren't as good at it as we think we are.