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Hidden research reveals what reasonable people have always known about distracted driving.

GREG KESICH July 22, 2009

So, now you tell me! And all this time I thought banging out a text message while driving my car was perfectly safe.

But some do-gooder traffic safety groups have forced the U.S. Department of Transportation to turn over six-year-old files suppressed for political reasons showing that talking on a cell phone while driving is not a good idea.

Even, it turns out, if it's a hands-free device. It doesn't specifically mention texting, but draw your own conclusions.

This is the part where we're all supposed to be shocked, like the smokers who read the surgeon general's report back in the '60s. "You mean these pleasurable products that make my heart race and turn my teeth black might be bad for my health? Why, I had no idea!"

There are some things that shouldn't require research. Cell phone use by drivers is one of them. But they are so handy and difficult to ignore that we overlook the obvious. We have turned distracted driving into a fact of life, and people have become as addicted to their electronic devices as smokers are to cigarettes.

So while the numbers of people on the road chatting and texting each other has increased, most states have failed to do anything about it, and most of the ones that have tried to do something haven't done enough.

Tuesday's revelation is that while federal highway officials were compiling data that would have supported more urgent action, their bosses sat on it, according to a report in The New York Times, to avoid "angering Congress."

If you were a governor in 2003, here is a letter you didn't get from then-Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta:

"A significant body of research worldwide indicates that both hand-held and hands-free cell phone use increase the risk of a crash. Indeed, research has demonstrated that there is little, if any, difference between the use of hand-held and hands-free phones in contributing to the risk of driving while distracted. In each operational mode, we have found that the cognitive distraction is significant enough to degrade a driver's performance.

"We recommend that drivers not use these devices when driving except in an emergency. Moreover, we are convinced that legislation forbidding the use of hand-held cell phones while driving will not be effective since it will not address the problem. In fact, such legislation may erroneously imply that hands-free phones are safe to use while driving."

Why the department sat on the information is unclear, but the authors of the study believe it was sensitivity to lobbying from the wireless communications industry.

We can't know if this letter from Mineta would have made any difference in the state legislatures, which have their own sensitivities to lobbying, but we do know that the reasearchers estimated that cell phone use by drivers caused about 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents in 2002, and that the estimated percentage of drivers using cell phones at any given time has doubled since then.

Talking and texting while driving has become part of the culture, and millions of young drivers have come of age expecting to use that down time they have when they are, say, passing a logging truck on a two-lane highway, to tell that special someone, "U R HOT."

OK, so we know. It's dangerous. Now what?

The Maine Legislature looked a little timid when it turned down a whole series of bills that would have curtailed cell phone use by drivers. Instead, it passed a law that goes into effect this September that takes a broader view than most states and gives law enforcement a tool it will need.

The law makes failure to maintain control of a motor vehicle illegal and defines a distracted driver as one who is doing something that:

(1) Is not necessary to the operation of the vehicle, and

(2) That actually impairs or would reasonably expect to impair the ability of the person to safely operate the vehicle.

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