YRU screwN me?

Got an unlimited text message plan for your cell phone?  Good for you, since the prices are rising.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four. [emphasis mine]

And why not?  Texting volume has increased exponentially.  But the cost doesn't.  In fact, the bandwidth for text messages costs nothing - it's always been there.

text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted. 

In other words, we're getting screwed.  With cell phone companies, that's no surprise.

Cell phones may cause traffic jams

The science slowly catches up to the intuition about driving distracted.

First, a study at the University of Exeter last month noted that traffic jams are not caused by heavy traffic, but by drivers overreacting. Braking too hard or slowing below certain speeds creates a ripple effect that can put you in an area of abruptly slow traffic with no indication as to why. The key issue:

This model takes into account the time-delay in drivers’ reactions, which lead to drivers braking more heavily than would have been necessary had they identified and reacted to a problem ahead a second earlier.

Why is the time delay key? Because that's what cellphone chatting or other distracted driving does - reduce reaction time.

Motorists talking on the phone drive about two miles per hour more slowly than people who aren’t on the phone...Slower cellphone drivers may be increasing overall commuting times by 5 percent to 10 percent, he calculates, and talking on the phone may increase each daily commuter’s travel time by 20 hours a year....other studies have shown that delayed reaction time related to cellphone use is a safety hazard.

The slow driving held true regardless of use of a hands-free headset:

It’s the talking, not the cellphone, that distracts the brain.

Prediction: the findings will lead to the splendid irony of finding that many Americans phone their destination when they get stuck in traffic to report in and pass the time, perpetuating the traffic jam.