Slashdot Mirror
US Agency Blocked Cellphone / Driving Safety Study
By now you've probably seen the NY Times's long piece on distracted driving — about how most drivers and most legislators willfully ignore the evidence of the dangers of talking on a cellphone, texting, and other electronic distractions while behind the wheel. According to this article, cellphone use while driving causes over 1,000 fatalities a year in the US. Another shoe has now dropped: it seems that the US National Highway Safety Administration blocked a proposed definitive study of the risks. The NHSA now cites concerns about angering Congress. Two consumer safety groups had filed a FOIA request for documents about the aborted study, and the Times has now made the documents public — including the research behind the request for a study of 10,000 drivers.
The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002.
The scary thing about this is that those numbers were from 2002. Think about how many more cellphones there are out there today than there were in 2002.
This guy's the limit!
For starters we could enforce the existing laws. Caught talking on your cellphone twice, hand over your license.
All the existing laws are "feel good" laws for sanctimonious pricks. All the studies that have been published show that it isn't the act of holding a phone up to your ear that causes a driver to be distracted, it is simply talking on the phone that matters. But all of the laws give free passes to anyone with a handsfree phone. That's arguably worse than holding the phone to your ear - if you do that, at least the other drivers have a chance of noticing that you are on the phone and giving you a wide berth, handsfree makes you look like all the other drivers even though you are not as engaged with the road as they are.
If a pilot be required to be communicating on a radio while they land and take off - in a fast moving vehicle that falls out of the sky if not kept within parameters, at the edge of those parameters - I think drivers can be taught to drive safely on a cell phone.
One difference is that he is talking on the radio ABOUT what he is doing. His brain isn't focused on flirting with the ATC.
Another difference is that the ATC knows when to shut the hell up and let the pilot do his job if something goes wrong, just like someone in the passenger seat would. But someone on the other end of the phone may not even know he is talking to a driver.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We can't even teach people to signal turns and lane changes reliably. Teaching cell phone safety to the public is about as likely to happen as someone winning the lottery jackpot 37 times in a row by finding discarded tickets in the street.
Maybe you should also research the change in DUI laws, automobile safety and total number of auto accidents, not just fatalities.
Anytime 50 fucktards would be jumping up and down screaming that correlation != causation. This time, since the evidence suits their needs, they keep their mouths shut.
As for the rest of the causes, yes, they are causes of accidents. No one said they should be exempt.
he hardly introduced facts. merely stated a number of deaths on roads without taking into account the reduction in deaths from improved roads, improved vehicle safety (airbags etc) and improved vehicle control mechanisms and as such his fact is completely meaningless and does not help either side of the argument. For all we know when put in context cell phones could be causing 40,000 deaths a year 300% a year since 2000 or they could be causing zero. Simply throwing a statistics into the argument without any context is idiotic. In effect he has used facts and yet provided absolutely ZERO substance and relevence to the debate.