HOLD ALL THOSE CALLS?\Study ties car phones to crashes.

Byline: Yardena Arar Daily News Staff Writer

Don't schmooze and drive.

That's the apparent message of a study which found that motorists who spend more than 50 minutes a month on a cellular phone were 5.59 times as likely to have accidents as light users.

Researchers John M. Violante of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., and James R. Marshall of the State University of New York in Buffalo based their findings on surveys of 100 New York drivers who had had an accident within the last year and 100 who had gone at least 10 years without an accident.

They found that 13.2 percent of those who had had an accident owned cellular phones, compared with 9.1 percent of the accident-free drivers.

They also found that the risk of having an accident increased when drivers used cellular phones while performing other activities that required removing their hands from the steering wheel, or drinking either alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages.

The study, published in the Journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention - a British periodical - was immediately challenged by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association in Washington, D.C.

"We don't have a problem with scientific or statistically valid studies, but there have been no other studies conducted by anyone that have reached the same conclusion," CTIA spokeswoman Pam Small said.

She noted that Violante and Marshall themselves had pointed to limitations in the study, including the relatively small sample and the inability to establish a causal link between cellular phone use and traffic accidents.

"They have no evidence that people were using phones at the time of an accident," she said.

Melissa May, spokeswoman for AirTouch Cellular in Irvine, said about 1.5 million people in the greater Los Angeles area - including Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Los Angeles counties - have cellular phones.

The California Highway Patrol, which keeps traffic statistics, does not record information on cellular phone use.

CHP spokesman Steve Kohler said officers do ask motorists involved in accidents to describe what they were doing at the time, including talking on a cellular phone.

"But when that huge report comes to the people who enter data in the computer, there is no field that includes cellular telephone use," said Kohler, reached by phone in Sacramento.

"We have not seen a large enough number of crashes where in the investigative officer's opinion a cellular phone played a large enough part to justify doing that."

Insurance companies do not collect data on cellular phone use, either, said Larry Kibbee of the American Insurers Highway Safety Alliance, a Chicago-based trade group.

"The ones I talked to have not put cell phones on the radar screens for purposes of rating automobile premiums," he said. "It's not been presented to them as much of a risk factor."

"Our speculation is that it doesn't have a high automatic impact on the frequency of accidents up to this point," said Tom Cordova in State Farm Insurance's Westlake Village regional office. "However, anything that distracts a driver from giving their full attention to the road can't be good."

Cellular phone companies advise customers to avoid dialing while on the road, to buy hands-free kits that allow drivers to keep both hands on the steering wheel while talking on the phone, and to pull off if a conversation becomes emotional or intense.

Kohler acknowledged that some drivers may use cellular phones unwisely.

"I think everyone has seen people talking on cell phones that had no business doing that while they were driving," Kohler added. But, he said, a study performed in the early 1980s when wireless phones first came into use in cars didn't find much cause for alarm.

"It didn't seem to require much more attention than operating the radio in the car if it was done correctly, and I don't think anyone would contend that we should be tearing out radios and cassette players and CD players."