Because so many of us drive with one hand on a cell phone, there’s an understandable tendency to pooh-pooh the danger of such behavior. This extends to lawmakers like Sen. Vicki Walker, a Eugene Democrat who wants “to see the data” before considering any sort of cell phone ban.

After all, she reasons, “How many times is an accident because of a cell phone, or a person drinking coffee or lighting a cigarette?”

Drinking coffee while driving may or may not be safe. Beats us. Assuming Walker truly wants to see some data, though, she should take a gander at the summer 2006 edition of “Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.”

The journal’s title doesn’t exactly scream “read me,” but the pooh-pooh brigade should find a piece by a group of University of Utah researchers sobering.

What the researchers found, in short, is that driving while yapping on a cell phone is just as dangerous as driving while legally intoxicated.

They discovered this by rounding up a bunch of volunteers and having them operate a driving simulator under three scenarios: sober and non-chatting; in the midst of a “casual” cell phone conversation; and tipsy on the strength of a few screwdrivers. By “tipsy,” we mean just drunk enough to exceed the legal limit of 0.08 percent.

The tipsy people and chatty people drove differently. The former tended to be more aggressive and squash on the brake pedal harder than absolutely necessary. The latter tended to react slowly and, interestingly, to accelerate back to speed slowly after braking. This final behavior, while not necessarily dangerous, can wreak havoc on traffic flow, especially when the road is crowded.

Though the two groups drove badly in different ways, the study found that “the impairments associated with cell phone drivers may be as great as those commonly observed with intoxicated drivers.” Nevertheless, most of the experienced cell phone drivers believed phone use didn’t make driving any harder at all, suggesting that cell-phone use “may make drivers insensitive to their own impaired driving ability.”

It didn’t matter, by the way, whether the cell phone drivers were using hand-held or hands-free devices. The problem wasn’t what people were doing with their hands, but, rather, what they were doing with their brains. Even when “participants direct their gaze at objects in the driv-ing environment, they often fail to ‘see’ them when they are talking on a cell phone because attention has been directed away from the external environment and toward an internal, cognitive context associated with the phone conversation.” At least smokers don’t hold deep, distracting conversations with their cigarettes while they’re lighting them.

This is scary stuff. Unless lawmakers can produce a more credible study debunking these findings, they must support the most restrictive of the cell phone bills under consideration this session.

Drivers in Oregon should be prohibited from using all cell phones, period. It shouldn’t matter that the practice is incredibly widespread (8 percent of daytime drivers are using cell phones at any given moment, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration).

Popularity doesn’t make a dangerous practice safe. Imagine how panicked Oregonians would be if 8 percent of daytime drivers were legally drunk at any given moment.