Social networking is considerably less safe than texting, drinking to the legal limit and smoking marijuana. And yes, talking on a mobile phone with or without a hands-free is definitely not good for your health, or the health of other road users.
According to the RAC Report on Motoring 2011, eight per cent of U.K. drivers admit to using smartphones for email and social networking while driving, and 24% of 17-24 year old drivers admit the same - three times the average!
If 24% of drivers aged 17-24 were driving around drunk, there would be a massive public outcry. This is much worse, but we blindly accept this clash of technologies which is costing thousands of lives.
Don't expect lot of help from your politicians on this one. The automotive lobby is one of the best organised of any industry, and the alcohol lobby too. Politicians, like it or not, want to get reelected, so they are incentivized to dodge hard decisions that have a purview beyond their immediate term of office. We've already seen plenty of evidence to suggest the Governments of the world simply don't want to hear the truth about drugs and alcohol and the road toll.
There has never been a better example of this than the lame "hands free laws" which have been universally adopted by modern governments. You'll see from the findings that talking on a phone in your hand slows your reaction times by roughly 50%, way more than talking on a hands free telephone at 26% slower.
If, on average, a user's reflexes are 26% slower than when are not talking on a phone, does that sufficiently impair that person's ability to drive enough to ban them from doing so?
Now these findings mostly mirror prior research findings that show that talking on a hands-free mobile phone slows reflexes to be around those of someone who has a blood alcohol content of 0.08%.
A tragedy happens every single on our roads, day in day out, and the carnage grows greater every day and we accept a massive annual road toll as the price we pay for personal mobility and owning a symbol of freedom - the motor car.
One person dies every 27 seconds on a road somewhere on the planet, which equates to a stunning rate of attrition. WW2 was the greatest loss of life in humanity's long history, and 50 million people died in six years - a burn rate of roughly nine million humans a year. Well the road toll is currently 1.3 million a year and heading for 2 million less than a decade from now.
Aggregate statistics are often difficult to relate to, and hence I looked around to try to find a way of putting them in perspective to highlight just how appalling the statistics we accept really are. For instance, ten times more people die on the roads each year than in the entire Iraq War so far - counting both sides and civilians.
Then I put together a list of the most fatal wars in history, divided the number of deaths by the number of years to get the "burn rate" and then compared it with the annual road toll.
Despite mankind's long and extremely brutal history of war, only five wars in history have killed more people per year, and if we included the annual numbers for the road toll each year, only six wars would make the top 20.
The American Government Distracted driving web site describes distracted driving as "a dangerous epidemic on America's roadways", citing more than 3000 American deaths a year specifically related to distracted driving.
Sadly, it's not even Darwinian selection at work, as the person you hit through your distraction is most likely entirely innocent.