Cellphones and driving: Another Bush cover-up?

From TrueSlant.com:

Back in 2003, the U.S. Department of Transportation conducted a study on the safety of driving while talking on a cell phone. Their conclusion was that multi-tasking isn’t a welcome activity for those who operate automobiles. Whether they are hand-held, or hands-free headsets, talking while driving is a dangerous activity equivalent to getting behind the wheel with a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent. But this alarming 250-page report never saw the light of day under the Bush administration. Rather, it was withheld from public view (says The New York Times) so as not to cause a stir in Congress.

The stats on car crashes and cell phone use are a bit tricky to gather, but the DOT report confirmed at least 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents nationwide due to the prevalent combination of cell phone use and driving. Of course, those figures are certainly much lower than the actual ones, since the last thing someone is likely to do is admit to one’s friends or insurance company that the he or she crashed was due to talking on the phone. More often than not, cell phone records aren’t currently used like breathalyzers, so the stats rely on self-reporting or eyewitness testimony.

Is using a cell phone while driving as dangerous as getting behind the wheel while intoxicated? Well, again, that’s hard to measure. A blood alcohol level of .08% treats each individual in a different way. Likewise, some people simply get more engaged in their phone conversations with others. While the DOT report suggests an equivalence with cell phone driving and a .08% blood alcohol level, no good stats are out there to tell us just how many people died who drove with that exact level of booze flowing through their veins. In 2003, however, there were a total of 14,630 road deaths that involved a driver with a blood alcohol of .08% or above (and that includes victims of the crashes, too).

What the report makes clear (if you couldn’t intuit this on your own) is that driving while gabbing on a cell phone (or, worse, while sending a text message) is not safe. That if Congress is worried about drunk driving, it should also be worried about cell phone use among drivers. That may be unwelcome news for American business and consumers alike, but them is the covered-up facts.