Mobile phone use contributes to a 1/3 of fatal crashes in QLD

[2011G6E]

Love the comments about "I do it all the time and nothing has happened to me...yet..."

Just because you are a master of concentration and mutli-tasking who's able to do things that go against all the evidence, doesn't mean everyone should be allowed to in a blanket "It's OK, he can do it so you can too".

The figures are simply overwhelming that, oddly talking on a mobile is different to talking to someone sitting beside you. The odd fact seems to stem from the fact that your brain can't figure out where to concentrate the conversation...there's no other physical person there that you are talking to, so your brain devotes a lot more resources than it normally would to concentrating on the conversation, working much differently to when someone is sitting beside you and you are talking to them. It's really weird, but it's simply a fault of the wiring in our grey stuff.
Oddly enough two way radios such as the UHF you might have fitted don't seem to have the same effect. One theory is that the voice you are "speaking to" on a UHF is loud and your brain interprets it as someone else in the car...even if they're actually not there. This is linked to why it's much better to have hands free going if you simply must talk on the phone as you drive along. However, there is still a smaller instance of the same effect going on when you use hands free...it's not risk free, it's just safer than using the phone in your hand.

As new stuff appears, laws have to change to keep up...we never had mobile phones, but plenty of people had (and still do have) accidents looking down to tune thier radio or change a cassette in the days before steering wheel controls, let me tell you. Mobiles just added a new way to distract the driver.

Basically, is your life that busy that you simply must answer each and every call and text the moment you get them?
Hell, you'd hate to work in my job where, if you have your mobile with you at all during the twelve hour shift in the locomotive cab, regulations say quite sternly that it has to be either turned off or on silent in your work bag, and you aren't allowed to look at it while the train is in motion. That would drive some people mad being out of contact with thier precious mobile for hours at a time...