Cell Phone Use While Driving

Cell Phone Use While Driving Cell phones play an important role in communicating in our modern society. Although using a cell phone is a convenient and fast way for getting in touch with people, they should not be used while operating an automobile. Cell phone use while driving has dramatically increased over the past years in the U.S., and studies show that the risk of having an automobile accident or near accident significantly increases when a person is talking on their cell phone. Although not everybody who uses their cell phone while driving has been or will be in an accident, but an alarming number of people who were involved in automobile accidents have been reported to have been using a cell phone while driving. Because of the increased number of traffic accidents caused by cell phones, I believe cell phone use should be banned while driving automobiles. Using a cell phone while driving is not only a major distraction, but it can be extremely dangerous or even fatal. In a recent study done by Strayer and Johnson, they found that “cell-phone conversations made drivers more likely to miss traffic signals and react more slowly to the signals that they did detect” (Strayer and Drews 128). Awareness of one’s surroundings is vital in safe operation of an automobile. When a driver is talking on a cell phone, the phone conversation “disrupts performance by diverting attention from the external environment associated with the driving task to an engaging context associated with the cell-phone conversation” (Strayer and Drews 129). The U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that the use of cell phones while driving is the number one cause of driving distraction leading to car crashes and accidents (Cramer, Mayer, and Ryan 181).
Although many believe that hand-held cell phones cause the most distraction