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Does cell phone use while driving make your driving more ass-like? You’d think so, but a hundreds of thousands of Boston drivers can’t be wrong…and our research can’t prove them so. DLA research shows that Boston drivers using cell phones are no worse than a 12 year-old and 87 year-old Uncle Heshi up from Boca. In Boston, nothing prevents us from driving like ass.
We driving research academics are part of a small community so it doesn’t take much to get things buzzing. Last month two things dominated the DLA latte-and-muffin circuit here in Boston: the release of findings from a study by University of Utah driving cognoscenti David Strayer entitled Drivers’ Lane-Changing Behavior While Conversing on Cell Phone in Variable-Density Simulated Highway Environment, and the passage in the Massachusetts House of Representatives of H-4477 which would ban use of cell phones while driving.
Professor Strayer proved to be more media savvy than the State legislature by timing his release for the post-New Year’s news vacuum. The Mass pols, on the other hand, were—not surprisingly—a pound short and several years too late—and their announcement got a balled up in Boston’s Super Bowl paroxysm: Strayer’s announcement made the Boston Globe; passage of H-4477, a bill that could make Massachusetts one of only five states in the nation to fully ban cell phone use while driving, did not.
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