At the end of January, Prince Edward Island became the most recent Canadian province to ban the use of hand-held devices while driving, just as Ontario police geared up to start enforcing Ontario's hands-free law on Feb. 1, 2010.

Alberta, which has legislation pending, remains the only province without a ban in place. Ontario adopted the ban last October, but police said they would only give warnings until Feb. 1, 2010. That’s when they started enforcing the new law. Fines start at $155 and go as high as $500.

It’s not a moment too soon, said Scott Marshall, director of training for Young Drivers of Canada. "Most people won't stop doing it until they get caught," he predicted. "It's the 'it won't happen to me' syndrome.'"

 

In an effort to drive home the risks, Marshall and Roadawareness.ca founder Shaun de Jager invited media to participate in a "distracted driving experiment" on Sunday, Jan. 31, at Formula Kartways in Brampton, Ontario, about 45 minutes north of downtown Toronto.

Participants drove go-carts around the track once distraction-free, but using only one hand to steer while responding to commands to slalom around cones, swerve and brake. That set a baseline for driving ability with one hand on the wheel. Then they were asked to drive while talking on the phone and texting.

The result? For starters, from half a second to a full second delay in braking.

"That's significant," said de Jager. "We travel 92 feet per second at 100 kilometres per hour, and if you're going to waste even half of that time, you've essentially lost 40 plus feet."

That can mean the difference between hitting a car or pedestrian that darts in front of you and braking in time.

"I'd like to have that 40-odd feet back if I have to stop," he said.

"We illustrated what we were looking for quite effectively," said Matt Coffey, who volunteered to grade participants in the slalom portion of the experiment.

As a participant, I can report that I had to drive much slower while talking on my phone. Driving with one hand seriously diminished my ability to navigate a turn or swerve when directed to do so. Texting was all but impossible. I hit a wall while trying text a four-word response to a question.

Other findings from the distracted portion of the driving experiment:

    • Increased difficulty turning corners. Many drivers negotiated
      corners more slowly.
    • A 50-percent increase in collisions with cones.
    • A slight increase in collisions with walls. Only one participant
      made contact with the wall during the “no distractions”
      component, but several made wall contact while being 
      distracted on the phone or while texting.
    • Inability to maintain speed. Most participants slowed down 
      or were inconsistent in speed.
    • Inability to multi-task. During phone calls, some participants
      told their caller “hold on a second” so that they could negotiate
      the slalom course or a tight corner.
    • Hands-free driving with both hands while using headphones
      or a wireless device was still distracted. Braking response 
      times were slightly better, but performance was not as good
      as distraction-free driving.




Road safety experts say the bans will save lives. According to the most recent data available from Transport Canada, car crashes caused 2,604 fatalities and 144,756 personal injuries in Canada in 2006. Many of those are being blamed on the increased use of cell phones. In the U.S., as much as 16 percent of traffic fatalities are being blamed on driving distractions.

As far back as 1997, University of Toronto researcher Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani of Stanford University published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that said talking on a cell phone quadrupled the risk of getting into an accident. The following year, a study from the Rochester Institute of Technology said the risk of fatality increased by a factor of nine when a cell phone was found in vehicles that had been in an accident.

On the street, the go-carts’ impacts with walls could represent hitting curbs, drifting out of the lane into oncoming traffic, or veering into a ditch, said de Jager.



"The inconsistent speed was likely due to mental processing being divided between the task of driving and using their phone," he said in a Roadawareness press release. "In the cases where drivers significantly reduced their speeds, it was a conscious act done so that they would be able to take their eyes off the track longer and leave more time to react to the environment. One driver actually had to stop on the track to reply to a text message."

Even the smaller decrease in performance while using a hands-free device "is a clear indication that they were not able to perform both tasks simultaneously," de Jager said.

But legislation that allows hands-free use of the devices provides a false sense of security, said safety advocates, who are increasingly using the word “impaired” to describe the effect it has on driving.

To demonstrate this to his Young Drivers of Canada students, Marshall has them play patty cake on their kneecaps. Then he asks them to play patty cake while saying the alphabet backwards.

"They can’t do it,” he said. “While their brain is thinking about one task, the brain won't allow them to do a physical activity smoothly. The moment you're impairing your driving -- with distracted thought, with a cell phone, with a text message, eating a donut, drinking a coffee -- you're not focusing on your driving the way you need to."

Police say it’s shocking how many people ignore the risk of handheld devices while driving, despite increasing evidence that it contributes to injuries and fatalities.
The cones hit on the indoor go-cart track in the real world "could be an immovable object or a human being," Toronto Const. Hugh Smith noted.

It could also kill you and your passengers. "There's a UK study showing that you have more than a 30 percent worse chance of survival texting than you do drinking and driving," Marshall noted.

 

 

Photos: by Liz Metcalfe