Mr Macaw wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:58:03 -0000, Jolly Roger wrote:

On 2016-01-21, Mr Macaw wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 20:33:37 -0000, Your Name wrote:

Nope. Tests have shown that cellphone conversations can be more
distracting and dangerous than talking with a passenger. The passenger
can see what's happening and knows to shut up at particularly dangerous
points and can even help out by checking traffic in the opposite
direction, etc. The person on the other end of the phonecall simply
keeps blabbering on.

Also, many people ridiculously seem to think that because it's a
phonecall it is more "important" and so they concentrate more on it
than they do on an "unimportant" conversation with a passenger.

Your second paragraph explains my point well. Only a complete and
utter moron will prioritise a phonecall over driving. In everyday
life, we are constantly prioritising without even thinking about it.
And there is no reason to penalise sensible folk by making it illegal
to do two things at once, just because a few morons are incapable of
it. If I'm driving along with my phone to my ear, and I need to
swerve round something, I will simply drop the phone. I have done so
in the past.

That doesn't magically negate or refute his first paragraph. A person on
the other end of a phone line doesn't have eyes on the road or
environment around the car, and cannot react to changing circumstances
the way a passenger can.

They don't need to, the driver does that, with a higher priority than the conversation.

Nope. I'm not sure if you are being intentionally obtuse, or you are just
missing the point. Of course it is the responsibility of the driver to pay
attention to conditions around them; but it is an accepted fact that humans
do not multitask well, and the driving environment forces us to multitask
as a necessity. Two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. If the
driver happens to be looking in one direction (to check cross traffic, for
instance), a passenger who is holding a conversation with the driver can
see something critical happening in the other direction, and their audible
and/or visible (perhaps even tactile) reaction can inform the driver. That
simply cannot happen if the person on the other end of the conversation is
miles away blabbering nag away on the other end of the phone.

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JR