TEETH WERE GNASHING and phone lines crackling over at Redmond corporate headquarters on Monday. No, not that Redmond corporate headquarters. The aggrieved company this time was AT&T Wireless Communications, credited as a sponsor of a new study that might spell disaster for the cell phone industry—and blessed relief for those who feel menaced by oblivious jabbering drivers.
Both AT&T Wireless and Harvard University’s Center for Risk Analysis are at pains to note that AT&T actually funded an earlier iteration of the center’s study, in 2000, when medical findings debunked suggestions that cellular microwaves cause brain cancer. And Harvard’s first look at phones as crash factors concluded that banning them from roadways would not be cost-effective in saving lives.
Since then, British and Finnish research has implicated cell phones in noncancerous, sometimes fatal auditory-nerve tumors as well as brain cancer. And now the Harvard team has factored subsequent cell phone growth and estimated that eliminating driving while phoning would prevent between 2 percent and 21 percent (most likely 6 percent) of crashes, some 330,000 injuries, 12,000 of them serious, and 2,600 fatalities.
The Cellular Communications and Internet Association, the standard-bearer for AT&T and other cellular firms, promptly attacked the Harvard findings as “old wine in a new bottle” and, in the words of spokesperson Kimberly Kuo, “not really a study at all,” since it re-examines old data. “Old wine?!” snorts one Harvard collaborator, David Ropiek. “We’ve got 28 million more cellular subscribers now. We didn’t have data before on how many of them use the phone while driving, or for how many hours.”
The cellular lobby leans on state tallies that show phones figure in only around 1 percent of crashes. But those data are flawed, notes Ropiek: “It’s all self- reported. Most people won’t say, ‘I was on the phone. I caused the accident.’ Their data’s very sketchy, and so’s ours.”An essential next step, he says, is getting good field data, perhaps through phone logs. Meantime, you might want to pull over and peel an eye for those who don’t when they’re on the phone.
