"It's not like drink-driving"

You wouldn't drive after four pints. You'd think less of someone who did. But the phone feels like a different category. Drink-driving is a moral thing and the phone is a lapse, and the sizes feel different too.

Strayer, Drews and Dennis Crouch tested that directly. In a simulator, they compared drivers talking on a phone, handheld or hands-free, with drivers who'd drunk enough to reach 0.08 per cent blood alcohol, which is the legal limit in England and Wales. The two groups were impaired differently. The drinkers drove more aggressively, following closer and braking harder. The phone drivers braked later and had more collisions. When the authors controlled for the driving conditions and the time on task, they concluded the impairments from phone use can be as profound as those from driving at the limit.

That's one simulator study, and a simulator isn't a road. I'm not going to tell you that a text is a drink. What I'll say is that the feeling that they're in different categories isn't coming from a measurement. It's coming from the fact that one of them is what bad people do and the other is what you do at the lights. Categories that come from that source aren't much use for deciding anything.

The reason it's worth a chapter is that the drink category is one you already respect. You have a rule about drinking and driving, and the rule doesn't bend for an empty road or a short trip or a good driver. You don't say you only drink-drive when it's safe. If the phone belongs anywhere near the same category, the rule it needs is the same kind of rule. Not a judgement made each time. A place the phone goes.