Hands Free remains a danger

22 July 2018

Highlighted on the Road Safety Knowledge Centre is a paper which explains that a hands-free mobile phone at the wheel is no safer than using a hand-held device. That’s the top line finding from this summary of peer-reviewed research prepared by Dr Adrian Davis, a visiting professor at the University of West England.

Dr Davis publishes a series of single page ‘essential evidence’ summaries to help disseminate academic research to road safety practitioners. In this summary: using either a hands-free or hand-held phone at the wheel increases crash risk fourfold.

The paper acknowledges that mobile phone use while driving is ‘widely prevalent’ in many countries across the globe – adding that the offence is one of the most serious forms of distraction because it requires visual, physical and cognitive attention from the driver.

The paper may be downloaded here.

Further knowledge is available on The Road Safety Observatory.