Real estate professionals who work while in their cars may see their dashboards as more of a desktop than a navigation system for the car. Outfitted with cupholders for drinks, power outlets for cell phones and laptops, and with seats and tilting steering wheels that adjust for minimal steering effort, the car as office is as comfortable as a cubicle. But is it safe to conduct business on cell phones while driving?

Researchers have been trying to tell drivers for years that talking on a cell phone while driving is dangerous. Conversations are distracting, and anything that diverts your attention from your primary task - keeping yourself and other occupants of the road safe while driving - is risky. Some communities have even tried to ban talking on the phone while driving, compromising instead on allowing talking drivers to use "hands-free" units.

But new research shows that cell phone conversations are more than a distraction; they actually cause drivers to self-induce a kind of tunnel vision, due to the concentration of the driver on the conversation - not the road. And that ratchets driver risk to a new level whether they use hands-free units or not.

Can thinking be dangerous while driving?

Research recently published by the University of Rhode Island shows that the eye movements of drivers while talking on cell phones showed decreased movement - tunnel vision, which is rather like looking straight ahead and not being able to pick up sights on the periphery of vision. Why drivers focus straight ahead while engaged in phone conversations, and what that means isn't being concluded by researchers yet, but it is certain that cell phone drivers aren't concentrating on the road.

Wearing headgear outfitted with tiny eye-tracking cameras, volunteer drivers in the study drove around while talking on cell phones. The recorded movements of the eyes showed that not only did the volunteers stop looking around the way they do when performing other activities while driving, they continued to sort of stare straight ahead after finishing their conversations.

Other tasks such as tuning the radio or adjusting the air, require only brief glances away from the road of no more than about 1.6 seconds, which most drivers are able to do without endangering themselves or others. Cell phone drivers, however, tend to look straight ahead at the road without glancing around which means they aren't cognizant of hazards coming at them from the sides.

The results caused researcher URI industrial engineering Professor Manbir Sodhi to comment, "The debate surrounding cell phone use in cars has been directed toward concerns over holding the phone. Holding the phone isn't the main issue - thinking is."

Real estate professionals are extremely mobile, conducting much of their work in their cars on the way to and from showings, appointments and farming excursions. They also work in a particularly detail-intensive environment, where a phone call can impact the activities of the day, as well as the dynamics of any transaction in progress. That means that details they hear or convey over the phone while driving require concentration on their conversations - perhaps at the expense of their own safety.

While there aren't any figures that show just how much in danger phone/driving agents are in, nationwide statistics give some indication.

• As early as 1997, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study equating driving while using a cell phone to driving drunk. The study found that drivers who talk on a cell phone are four times more likely to be in an accident than drivers who don't. 
• A year ago, the National Safety Council said that driver distraction is a contributing factor in 20 to 30 percent of all crashes, and that active conversation is a greater distraction while driving. That's nearly 1.2 million car crashes annually.
• A recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration survey found that nearly 75 percent of drivers reported using their phone while driving. At any time, 500,000 people or about three percent of drivers are driving and using their cell phones at the same time. A Prevention Magazine survey put the percentage at 85 percent.
• Reaction time for braking was 24 percent slower when people used a cell phone than when they were not, according to a study by researchers at Nfiami University.
• The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association estimates that there are about 120.1 million cell phones in use in the U.S.
• According to unreleased figures supplied by the National Association of Realtors, 93 to 100 percent of Realtors have cell phones, or nearly 800,000. If national averages hold true for the Realtor demographic, 600,000 agents are at four times the risk of other drivers for having car accidents.

No statistics currently exist for how many crashes are directly attributable to cell phone use, primarily because accident reports typically fail to note the difference between calls for help and what drivers were doing at the time of the crashes, but according to The Fatal Analysis Reporting System, federal government researchers say that in most collisions involving cell phones, the driver talking on the phone was responsible for the crash.

Published: August 16, 2002

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