From the front page of The New York Times, a big article on distracted driving and how the cell phone industry has promoted it.
Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving.
Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.
Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones.
“There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”
It was the early 1960s.
Long before cellphones became common, industry pioneers were aware of the risks of multitasking behind the wheel. Their hunches have been validated by many scientific studies showing the dangers of talking while driving and, more recently, of texting.
Despite the mounting evidence, the industry built itself into a $150 billion business in the United States largely by winning over a crucial customer: the driver.
For years, it has marketed the virtues of cellphones to drivers. Indeed, the industry originally called them car phones and extolled them as useful status symbols in ads, like one from 1984 showing an executive behind the wheel that asked: “Can your secretary take dictation at 55 MPH?”
“That was the business,” said Kevin Roe, a telecommunications industry analyst since 1993. Wireless companies “designed everything to keep people talking in their cars.”
They succeeded. The federal government estimated in 2007 that 11 percent of drivers were talking on their phones at any given time. But that success has come at a cost. Researchers at Harvard have estimated that, even seven years ago, drivers using cellphones were causing 2,600 fatal crashes a year in the United States and 570,000 accidents that resulted in a range of injuries, from minor to serious. read on...
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