Advocates support a ban on all hands-free devices behind the wheel

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s an ongoing struggle for both police and politicians in our province — convincing people to put down their phones while they’re trying to navigate our busy streets and highways.

But what if Bluetooth technology and hands-free head-sets were banned as well?

There is a push in one country to ban all calls behind the wheel and a local advocate with Drop It and Drive would love to see it happen here too.

The group’s Karen Bowman agrees with the government in the United Arab Emirates that using any kind of phone has an impact on driving.

“With distraction, there are three main causes: visual, manual, and cognitive. Visual and manual are pretty self-explanatory, but cognitive is where you get into your brain’s capacity to do more than one thing at a time, and David Teeter with the National Safety Council refers to it as ‘toggle tasking.’ We can’t actually multi-task two or more cognitively-demanding tasks at the same time. Your brain has to choose one or the other.”

“So while you’re driving and you either make or receive an incoming call, you’re now only partially paying attention to what’s going on around you, and the scary thing with that is because you’re still looking around you, you have this built-in belief system that you’re seeing and you’re taking in everything. But your brain actually can’t do that. It’s filling in the blanks, but it’s filling in the blanks without having all the correct information [with] the constantly changing environment around you,” she explains.

Bowman acknowledges bringing this idea in would be a big challenge, and expects without education and science to back up the arguments, there would be an uproar.

“Seeing as how long it’s taken to increase the fines in BC which hasn’t even happened yet, I’m not overly optimistic they would take this stand, certainly not any time soon. But I think as we see other countries starting to recognize the level of risk being so equal between a hand-held device and a hands-free device in terms of the level of distraction, hopefully BC and Canada will start to pay attention to that and look more at the science as opposed to peoples’ perceived rights to do what they want while they’re driving.”

Sometime this spring, the provincial government has promised to introduce tougher fines for distracted driving.

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