Losing our grip on reality

Ask the average mobile phone user whether they are worried about the potential health risks, and if the answer is yes, the chances are their concerns will focus on microwave emissions from their handset or the putative radiation risk from base stations.

Ask the family of Lincolnshire pensioner Arthur Smith and they are more likely to tell you about the dangers of driving with the phone clamped to your ear. Smith was killed in a head-on crash with a driver who was overtaking on a bend at 70mph, while arranging a dinner date with her boyfriend. She has just been jailed for a year. Hopefully, the remorse for what she has done will last a little longer.

When she gets back behind the wheel at the end of her two-and-a-half-year driving ban, I wonder whether she will be installing a hands-free phone? This, according to the mobile phone industry, is the solution to the driving hazard. As long as you have two hands on the steering wheel, the fact that you are bellowing into a microphone on the dashboard and trying to clinch a six-figure deal while negotiating the Hangar Lane Gyratory at dusk in a force-eight gale poses no threat to your safety or that of other road users.

Safety experts are not so sure. A study published last year by the Transport Research Laboratory found that drivers talking on a mobile displayed the same lack of concentration as people who had drunk two pints of beer.

Talking on the phone was significantly more difficult than changing radio stations, and dialling a number while driving was as dangerous as trying to read a map.

For intense conversations, hands-free phones proved as hazardous as handsets, while some simple hands-free kits were even worse. All phone conversations were deemed more risky than talking to a passenger in the car, because passengers can see when the driver needs to concentrate on the road and have the sense to shut up - presumably in the interests of self-preservation.

The hands-free phone option sounds like yet another example of technology offering a solution to a problem, when it is really part of the cause - rather like a brewery offering in-car dispensers for strong black coffee.

A lot of people talk on their phones while on the move because the pressures of their job make them feel they have to. In a society where we can bung off an email at will, or search the Web 24-hours a day, who wants to wait until they arrive at the office before making that crucial call? Now that our every waking minute can be logged and accounted for, who is prepared to waste an hour by concentrating on driving safely or relaxing with Classic FM?

Arthur Smith's death was at least the sixth to be directly attributable to a driver being distracted by using a mobile phone. If we don't slow down - figuratively, as well as literally - it won't be the last.

Paul Bray is a freelance IT journalist.