Letters
Environmental health
Volume 180 - Issue 1

Mobile telephone use among Melbourne drivers: a preventable exposure to injury risk

Authors:  Suzanne P McEvoy and Mark R Stevenson

Med J Aust 2004; 180 (1): 43-45. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2004.tb05775.x
Published online: 5 January 2004
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Suzanne P McEvoy,* Mark R Stevenson†

* Research Fellow, Injury Research Centre, School of Population Health, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009; † Director, Injury Prevention and Trauma Care Division, Institute for International Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW. scordovaATsph.uwa.edu.au

To the Editor: Taylor et al found that: “Mobile phone use is common among Melbourne metropolitan drivers despite restrictive legislation” and suggest that this constitutes “a preventable exposure to injury risk”.1 This raises two questions:

  • Does mobile phone use while driving affect road safety?

  • If so, do hands-free devices reduce the risk?

In their introduction, Taylor et al cited six publications to provide evidence that the use of a handheld mobile phone while driving increases the risk of a road crash. The studies by Lamble et al2 and McKnight and McKnight3 involved a hands-free device and examined driver impairment, not crash risk. The three papers by Violanti4-6 had significant limitations, including no phone billing information to demonstrate that drivers were using their phones at the time of the crash,4-6 reliance on police accident reports that may have involved more thorough investigations into fatal crashes than non-fatal ones,5 and small sample size with only 14 mobile phone users in one study.6 These limitations reduce the validity of the research.

The best of the epidemiological studies was a case-crossover study of 699 drivers in collisions involving property damage only.7 However, the oft-quoted four-fold increase in risk comes from the analysis of mobile phone use in a 10-minute hazard interval before the collision. This does not provide conclusive evidence that these drivers were on the phone at the time of their crash and indicates a statistical association only. Although shorter hazard intervals were also examined, one needs to be wary of the potential for misclassifying post-crash calls as pre-crash calls because the time of collision may be imprecise, mobile phone use is common following a crash and a call to the emergency services may not be the first call made after the event. If we conclude that the data are valid despite these limitations, then the fact that hands-free models did not reduce the risk must be noted.

Returning to our questions, although there is good evidence demonstrating driver impairment in laboratory-based studies, the epidemiological research has limitations that need to be dealt with to determine the real-world effect of mobile phone use while driving. We are currently undertaking two large epidemiological studies in Perth, involving about 2000 drivers over an 18-month period. The limitations have been addressed in the design of our studies. Furthermore, the evidence to date suggests that hands-free devices do not confer a safety advantage and this issue should not be ignored in driver education.

Authors

  • Suzanne P McEvoy2
  • Mark R Stevenson2
  • 1. Injury Research Centre, School of Population Health, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009
  • 2. Injury Prevention and Trauma Care Division, Institute for International Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW.

Correspondence: scordova@sph.uwa.edu.au

References

View this article on Wiley Online Library