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UAE Police Claim BlackBerry Outage Made Roads Safer
An anonymous reader writes "Road traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi and Dubai plummeted last week — and the local police have a theory as to why: drivers' BlackBerrys weren't working. Police in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have claimed that last week's worldwide BlackBerry outage, which frustrated business people around the world who were unable to communicate with their colleagues, had one positive result — less texting and reading of emails by people who should have been concentrating on driving instead. There could be other factors at play, however. For instance, popular UAE soccer player Theyab Awana was killed in a high speed crash near Abu Dhabi in September, amid claims that he was sending a message on his BlackBerry when he hit a lorry. The football star's father, Awana Ahmad Al Mosabi, made an emotional plea to people not to use smartphones while driving, and a Facebook campaign against the use of BlackBerry Messenger while driving has grown in popularity."
Yes, blame BlackBerries and their incredibly difficult to type on keyboards.
In all seriousness, though, why isn't it a campaign against texting while driving?
Having seen people swerving from lane to lane while talking or texting, there's no doubt in my mind cell usage while driving should be banned.
But I'm amazed that Abu Dhabi and Dubai have such a high penetration of Blackberries in their country that the outage could actually make a difference in road safety statistics. That's just amazing to me.
I wonder what would happen to the safety stats if all cell phones were disabled for a day as an experiment? (Not that it'll ever happen.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In a week, lousy mobile providers band together and adopt the new slogan: "Our Networks Save Lives".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Most people accept that texting and cellphones cause accidents. But, most people also think they're better drivers than everyone else, and therefore it's okay for them to do it. Even cops do it. I see them all the time.
The only solution is making it illegal internationally. But considering the U.S. alone only bans it in a handful of states, we have a long way to go of convincing people that their ego doesn't make it okay.
I live in central Nebraska and I can tell you that using a cellphone while driving here is much safer than in the big cities. I don't text and I don't build model airplanes while driving. Please take common sense into consideration before making a generic law which bans cellphones for everyone. Thank you!
Duh, just look to see if accidents increased again when service was restored.
People would be constantly checking their phones to see if they're working again. At least with a working device you only bother with it when it notifies you.
While I agree that they're a distraction, I just don't see them as less of a distraction if people keep checking them to see if it's working again.
Here's a simple solution that could be built in - a gps check to see if the phone is travelling too fast to be a human on foot - and disable the keypad.
Texting while driving is stupid and irresponsible. What is so important that it can't wait til you arrive at your destination? I would say let them all die and weed their genes out of the gene pool, but too many innocent people would be injured as well.
Sent from my iPhone (while driving)
TFA says "Road traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi are said to have dropped by 40%, and there was a 20% reduction in Dubai in the past week." But that could have been totally spurious noise that coincidentally aligned with the Bberry outage. If accidents had been higher instead, would they have ignored it? If you only ever make note of coincidences and ignore non-coincidences, then life can seem pretty magical when really all you have is a filter that shows you what you'd like to believe. Bottom line: please share the data and let us all judge for ourselves whether there is cause-and-effect going on here.
Yes, very likely.
A famous football player there was killed in a car accident.
His father made a plea for people not to use smart phones or Blackberry devices while driving.
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From where I live .... drivers around here are doing many other things except ... driving.
Where I live there is a joke. 99% of Drivers are Drunk. Of the rest ... 99% do not have a license. Of the rest ... 99% are sexting. ... or once had houses along the main roads are moving out ... pronto.
What does this add up to. One big fuck'n problem even if you are waling down the street on the sidewalk with all the cars fly'n off the road this way and that way. People who
An what about the louts drive'n their lorries through shopping center and school buildings just to get a piss off.
The End of Civilization.
Here in Alberta, we've recently enacted a distracted driving law which covers talking/texting while driving (holding the handset. Hands free devices allowed), fiddling with mp3 players and GPS units while moving, applying makeup and personal grooming, using a laptop, watching movies in the front seat on a hacked DVD player, etc.
The fine is $172 per infraction and yet I still see people doing all of the above. Hell, I was pulled over just after an intersection because the cop thought I was driving while distracted until he found out my truck has a manual transmission and I was just shifting gears!
If it takes a celebrity example of the problem to get peoples' attention, so be it - whatever works, and focus on celebrities is channeled into something positive for once. (In this case, it's the circumstances surrounding the soccer player's death)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
My family and I were traveling on I-95 in the US and saw a woman playing a violin while driving. No joke. Presumably, she was steering with her knees. In disbelief, I wanted to get a better look, but I wouldn't risk being in the lane adjacent to her. I think we need a campaign to ban playing musical instruments while driving.
To expand on this, the Mythbusters confirmed that the poor driving resulted regardless of using a hands-free device. The greatest component in the loss of driving abilities was the amount of concentration required by the discussion. They had people drive obstacle courses while having conversations three ways, 1) holding the phone 2) using a hands free device 3) with a passenger in the car.
The tests concluded that while having a casual conversation, the obstacle course was navigated well. When asked to solve simple math problems while driving, such as 56 divided by 8, the participants failed miserably. This was with a person in the back seat asking the questions.
I used to have my passenger read the letters from the Jumble puzzles to me while driving to pass the time. I thought I was safe as long as I had two hands on the wheel and I wasn't reading them myself. I don't do that anymore.
Both my parents have lived in Qatar for 10 years and have visited most of the countries in the region. Text or no text there are a huge number of shitty drivers in the form of careless nationals driving over there who can get away with literally anything up to and including totalling hundred thousand dollar cars and face minimal or zero prosecution for doing so, even though they endanger other drivers in the process. Check Youtube for videos of young stupid bastards driving up on two wheels. This is something my dad's seen first hand. There is a huge sea change in traffic law enforcement required to make the roads safer in that area of the world. Being smug about cell phone usage doesn't begin to tap into the problem they're actually facing.
Remember folks, this is the same RIM/Blackberry that wouldn't grant UAE and a few other countries a private BBM server so they got pissed and shut down the service. This article holds a little more than bias. The summary could read "The evil blackberry services were shutdown and our country is safer for it" and the overall message would remain the same.
While to the best source for scientific accuracy, Effin's science did a similar experiment in episode 2, where texting detoriated attention even worse than drinking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Effin'_Science
Yes, the drivers here (in Abu Dhabi) really are that bad. Blackberry's are not illegal here as other posts have said; they have huge billboards advertising the latest ones all over the place (Blackberry's were banned at one point, but RIM have let the UAE government to see the traffic, as has happened in many countries recently). The cars are also heavily tinted because of the sun, so it's almost impossible to tell what people are doing in their cars.
You also have a good mix of Indian, Pakistani, Arab, European and African drivers who all have different ideas about driving. It is not unusual for the middle lane on a 5 lane road to turn left in front of everyone else going straight.
But the most common accident is being rear-ended by drivers using their phones and not looking at the road. And I can say that over the last week I have seen less accidents, so the numbers actually sound right.
20% and 40% seem like suspiciously rounded figures. I wish people wouldn't make claims without publishing the actual data including the control data and standard deviation. Have the rates ever varied as much during other 3-day periods when there was no phone outage? The story about the soccer player is anecdotal and establishes neither correlation nor causation as it's not even conclusive he was texting and a sample space of 'one' is meaningless.
Kill a famous soccer player a week and legalize texting while driving. No net loss.
Who is Amid, and why does he claim that he was sending a message on his BlackBerry when he hit a lorry ?
I'm not a coward by any name.
... BlackBerry outage, which frustrated business people around the world who were unable to communicate with their colleagues, ...
Unable to communicate? Despite the fact that the phone & text services were not affected?
Did you know that the people in Dubai don't like the Flintstones, but the people in Abu Dhabi do?
Thank you, I'm here all week ;-)
The key thing is having a passenger who is aware of the situation outside the car. A passenger can keep you alert and active on a long, tedious drive, and can therefore be a good thing. In reality if you are navigating tricky obstacles, most passengers will shut up until you're out of danger, not throw maths questions at you :) That's why the phone is worse - the person on the other end has no way to read the driving situation and adjust their level of engagement accordingly.
Stop it. Or spend some money and buy an android phone that will do Text to Speech and Voice to Text for you, Or buy a ford with Sync if you cant deal with your OCD and let an incoming text sit until you can check it safely. I am even O.K. with you talking on the phone and driving if you have a headset. I have a bluetooth helmet and it is very safe to carry on a conversation while driving with a headset.
As a motorcyclist, I have resorted to mounting TWO 180db air horns to my bike. On 3 occasions I have had to blow those horns to get the attention of the idiot 20 something that is busy texting his/her BFF about some stupid thing instead of fricking driving and staying in their lane. Previously I have ridden 190,000 miles and 20 years without having to blow my horn except for one time when a 90 year old lady that should not have been on the road tried to run me off the road. Drivers that text are worse than a 90 year old blind woman with senility. I can easily spot them also on the highway on my daily commute easily, they are erratic and suddenly slow down and then speed back up.
Honestly, they need to make texting while driving a $10,000 file with 30 days in jail giving $1,000 of the fine to cops as a bonus to encourage them to go texter hunting.
I am tired of people risking my life so they can do something stupid, Either fine the stupid people hard, or let me start carrying large bolts to throw at their cars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Some people call it accidents, I call it natural selection. I'm sorry, but if you're dumb enough to text and email while driving then don't be surprised when you hit a pole.
The sad thing in all of this are the innocent people that get rammed into by these idiots.
~Syberz
Blackberries and the like are the bane of productive activity. Every meeting takes 5x as long and is 1/5 as effective because the idiots are tapping away on their phones instead of paying attention and contributing to the discussion; you wind up repeating everything multiple times and it still doesn't sink in because their eyes are glazed while thinking about how their friend just tweeted "OMG that hot guy totally checked me out."
There are a couple instances when it is useful to whip out your phone, like when you're lost and need directions or you're waiting for a bus and want to kill time. Or when you want to restart a server remotely. But those times are far outweighed by the inappropriate times.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If SMS, BBM, and FB blocked messaging when a phone was traveling on a road then lots of the problem could go away. Road GPS routes can be determined without much difficultly at the network level, and data like from the UAE shows that it will save lives.
Only audio interfaces should be permissible for drivers. I can safely use the phone with hands free voice dial and a headset while driving. I slow or pull over if it's business and I need to focus heavily on the discussion. Otherwise, I'm just sending notes or scheduling tasks. An audio UI for email nav, dictation, and TTS would be a killer killer app. no one will make it, though, except the big email providers because every other business model is DOA. Google, why you no do shit people want?
I can believe this. I visited Abu Dhabi (UAE) in 2008. Worst drivers ever. Aggressive.
I've visited about 60 different countries and all 7 continents, so I have a few examples to compare it with.
Well in Washington State, USA they banned ALL cell phone use while driving a few years ago (primary offense: a cell phone spotted in a drivers hand), so now we regularly follow a car down an open road, and people will slam on their brakes and swerve halfway off the road before stopping (still sticking partway into traffic) in order to catch the call before they hang up. It is a little unnerving on freeways. The truth is, if people put that much importance on answering phones/texts/etc. they are not going to be safe drivers no matter the laws in place.
It will be a problem until phones are location aware enough to not ring/place calls while in the driver area of a car... And I don't see that selling well.
A clue.
In fact the only thing you're not missing is a strawman.
In order to change the song on my CD/MP3 player it takes one hand off the wheel for all of 3 seconds and because I know where the buttons are it takes 0 eyes off the road. If I write a text on my mobile I take 2 hands off the wheel, 2 eyes off the road and 1 mind off the job. This is why I dont text, hell, I wont even bugger around with my radio when I'm on the freeway.
Also, I've lost count the number of times I've almost been side-swiped by some dingbat in a beat up old Excel talking on the phone. It's a good thing I was not on the phone and distracted like these utter tossers as that would have resulted 4 accidents in the last 3 months for me. The only reason wankers on phones dont have more accidents is because of other drivers who have a clue performing emergency manoeuvres to avoid them.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.