What price for staying connected?

March 05, 2010

By Sarah Mallonga
Project Manager, Strategic Consulting
PHH Arval

Is your need to keep up with the latest mobile technologies, stay “hyper-connected,” and increase productivity throughout the day actually costing you in the long run? I see it all the time: drivers on their cell phones. It doesn’t matter anymore whether they’re handheld or hands-free – talking on a cell phone while driving is a form of distracted driving. Texting while driving is even more distracting.

The cycle of risk. Using a cell phone while driving results in a higher risk of crashing. Our reaction, as a society, is then to mitigate this risk with more laws and more technologies to protect all of us from our own bad habits. Studies have shown a four-fold increase in crash risk from cell phone use while driving, and a 23-fold increase in crash risk from texting while driving.

To eliminate these behaviors, several US states have passed laws banning all handheld cell phone use for all drivers, and many more states have banned text messaging. There’s a federal ban on all texting by federal employees driving government-owned vehicles. [For a summary on the impact of cell phone use while driving, see PHH’s white paper (US Only).]

But since laws don’t appear to be enough to stop this behavior, there’s an emergence of technologies that will stop it for us – technology that literally restricts or disables cell phones in moving vehicles. Apparently, we’ll acknowledge that it’s risky behavior, but we’re not so willing to personally refrain from it ourselves. Are we actually willing to pay for a technology that disables our cell phones, when we can simply choose to turn them off before turning on the ignition? It puts forth the conundrum: What price are you willing to pay to stay connected and “be productive” vs. protecting the safety of your drivers and mitigating the risk to your company?

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