I meant that; guess I didn't word it right. Yes, less distracting. Oh, I just saw that they used the word dangerous and I used the word distracting. Talking to someone in the car is less distracting/dangerous vs. talking to someone on a cell.
I didn't read through every post/response/link on here; mostly I'm basing this on my own personal experiences and the many, many, many near misses with drivers who were simply not paying attention to the road because they were on their phone. I've talked on my cell a few times while in a store and I can tell you . . . . my brain/mind was focused on the phone conversation rather than what I was seeing going on around me. I've been on the phone will doing a task at home and I know that I can concentrate on the conversation OR the task but not both with equal attention. I believe that driving and cell talking/texting is extremely dangerous and the two do not mix well and if they banned cell phone usage while driving I'd be perfectly ok with it. Yes, even though it's uncle telling us what to do

because someone's distracted driving while they are talking on a cell is hazardous to me.
I would NEVER Doubt that Cells, Hands Free or otherwise are "Distracting"...
But Hundreds of Millions of Times a Week, AT LEAST, People Use their Phones while Driving...
To Compare it to Drunk Driving and say it's WORSE, as one of these Studies did, is simply Absurd...
It Exposes the Study for being Agenda Driven and then Calls into Question ANY Conclusion they would make.
peace...
It offends me to have to give SpidermanTuba any validation, but I think his criticism of my first post discussing the "study" out of Utah has some merit. In other words, upon further reflection, I believe that he is partly right in his critique of what I said. And Mal, you have demonstrated more objectivity on this topic than I have so far. Good for you; not so good for me.
That said, I did have a pretty much knee-jerk reaction to the "study" since its conclusions appear to be at odds with common sense. I cannot believe (and I still do not accept) that the use of a hands free cell phone is as distracting as being legally intoxicated. Since I found the "conclusion" to be ludicrous, I jumped to the conclusion that the study must be bogus.
It seems to me that rather than having that study properly critiqed (peer reviewed) in terms of its methodology, etc., people just adopt its conclusions almost as an article of faith. I would instead suggest that when a conclusion seems improbable, it would be better "science" to scrutinize the "study," its methodology and assumptions, etc.