To me, its not so much the talking as all the fiddling you have to do to operate the phone. After all, drivers have always talked to passengers. (Although there could be a different dynamic for phone calls -- i.e. pressure to avoid pauses to reassure the other party that you still have a connection. There might evolve another dynamic more like listening to radio where cell callers instinctively shift their attention to the road when necessary.)

What scares me more than seeing a cell phone is seeing the makeup mirror.

Apo, you shouldn't make me feel guilty for reading/commenting here while driving down this crowded residential street.

Actually, I just read about some new study says that there aren't less accidents when the driver uses a handsfree.

Yeah, apparently it isn't the futzing with something, it's the cognitive load of carrying on a conversation that causes the impairment. So hands free doesn't really help much.

One of the factors is that talking to someone you can't see requires more brain power than talking to someone you can. Apparently the brain tries to picture the person you're speaking to. This might apply to a passenger in the back seat talking with you too, except that when the other person is in the car, pauses and breaks in the conversation are more normal and acceptable because passengers can see that you're merging, turning, etc.

I also personally find that something on headphones/in your ear is much harder to tune out or shift focus away from than "normal" noises in the cabin (stereo, passengers).

I should look up European statistics for the same. This reminds me of a Discovery Channel show some months ago, about German autobahns (?sp). The narrator mentioned that German auto engineers were baffled by the desire for Americans to have cup holders in their cars ... "Why on earth would they need cup holders in the car?" they asked, "If you're in the car driving ... well, you should be *driving*."

Yeah, if you want to drink while behind the wheel, you really should go for the hands free model.