Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Duh, just look to see if accidents increased again when service was restored.
It's still dangerous even if you are in rural Nebraska, even if it isn't as dangerous as it is in the cities and there's ultimately no reason why one should be talking on the phone without at least a headset.
Compared to fully-attentive driving, using a cell phone while driving in Nebraska is no safer than anywhere else in the world. Text while driving, and you give X% less attention to the road. Being in central Nebraska just means you have less stuff you're likely to hit, so all driving is safer.
Think of it this way: If it's reasonably safe to drive in Nebraska while using a cell phone, imagine how safe it'd be if you didn't!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
Uh, no. If their phones notify them when they receive a message, there is no need to constantly check even during an outage.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
False sense of security. There may be less obstacles on the road but a deer is far less likely to run out in front of the car in a big city.
Doing anything else while driving is stupid and irresponsible, but people keep doing it. I don't drive all that much and I've seen people: texting, talking on the phone, fiddling with their navigation system, fumbling with stuff in the locker, receiving blowjobs, giving blowjobs, checking diapers, changing diapers, counting money, reloading a shotgun, shooting with a shotgun, choosing music, changing the car radio presets, sending shit from their iphones even. That is why the responsible measure against violators should be a preemptive Darwin award.
False sense of security.
There have been studies, and more well known, mythbusters did an episode on something very similar (is talking on a cellphone while driving just as bad as drinking and driving), and while mythbusters is a bit hollywood science at times, they confirmed the myth. Texting isn't that far off. And in other studies, is just as bad.
But don't take my word for it, take a look at all the studies and materials.
There's a reason why texting/talking on the phone is rapidly becoming illegal while driving. But hey! Maybe in Nebraska, facts and truths aren't the norm!
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.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
And wear a condom while you drive, you'll be that much safer.
Texting isn't that far off. And in other studies, is just as bad.
Wouldn't it be even worse because when you are talking you are still looking at the road, while when texting you are looking at the phone?
What is so important that it can't wait til you arrive at your destination?
If it is important, just stop and then text/call. But the people who text while driving are probably part of the group who will overtake a car just to arrive at a red light (that they saw before overtaking) one second sooner.
Agreed. Rare incidents like car crashes generally generate Poisson distributions. Without knowing how many accidents typically occur in a week, there's no way to know if a 40% change is statistically meaningful. The standard deviation is just the square root of the mean count. The value 40% is suggestive of a total count of 5 or 10, though of course any multiple of 5 would work. If it's a change from 5 to 3, it's not meaningful.
The headset is nearly useless. Talking over the phone is more distracting than a car passenger, because passengers realize when to stfu because of situational cues, and you aren't pressured to keep the conversation going when the situation demands all your attention since a passenger realizes this, but a phone participant doesn't and keeps on going.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002374605_cellphones12.html
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.
The headset is nearly useless.
I'll see you one useless and raise you a dangerous.
With a normal phone other drivers have a decent chance to notice the person with their hand up to their ear and give them a wider berth. But with the various handsfree laws in many states there is basically no way to distinguish between a normal driver and one who has half their mind on the other end of a telephone conversation.
The only study to ever show a significant improvement in safety with a handsfree phone versus a handheld phone was commissioned by Plantronics - maker of phone headsets. These handfree laws are just another case of "This situation is terrible! Something must be done! The wrong thing is something! So we must do the wrong thing!"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
And wear a condom while you drive, you'll be that much safer.
Darwin principle in action, ya gotta love it. Please use a telephone pole, not some innocent bystander to do it. Bye.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
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.
The only place I would disagree with cell phones being dangerous while driving is exactly that sort of place. When you have a hundred miles of practically straight country road ahead of you and nothing but grass plains on either side, it's pretty hard to swerve off the road, run into someone, or hit something bigger than a prairie dog.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Not to mention in rural Nebraska it should be even easier to find a spot to pull over if you need to make/take a call than it is in the middle of a busy metropolis, so there's even less excuse.
... 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?
My guess is that it's as bad or worse, it just doesn't show up as much in the statistics because, well, how do you prove someone was texting when they crashed unless they admit it after the fact? It's much easier to pull their call logs and show their phone was actively engaged in a call at the time, with texts it's much harder to prove unless you can show a pattern of behaviour over the preceeding minutes, and even then it's not nearly as conclusive.
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?
It is something and a hands free phone is somewhat better than nothing, you then have two hands on the wheel, making it less likely that you'll lose control of the vehicle due to losing your grip on the wheel. The problem with banning headsets as well is that you're never going to know who is and isn't using one, they're already small enough to be covered by ones own hair without having to be a hippy.
Texting isn't that far off. And in other studies, is just as bad.
Texting is at least an order of magnitude more dangerous than talking on the phone. You have to take your eyes off the radio for seconds at a time. At highway speeds, texting means missing hundreds of feet of action.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
Without knowing how many accidents typically occur in a week
Um, IIRC the accident rates in the UAE, per vehicle, per mile, are something like the highest in the world. I can't find that statistic, but I did find that in 2009, in the city of Dubai alone there were almost 9.8 accidents PER DAY, about 6.29% of which were fatality crashes. And in 2008 it was substantially worse (10% more accidents, 23% more fatalities).
And it also has this delightfully encouraging bit of advice:
The death toll on Dubai roads is one of the highest in the world per head of population, no doubt this is exacerbated by the prevalence of powerful expensive cars and opportunities to drive them fast. It doesn't help that 80% or more of Dubai is expatriate with a wide range of nationalities represented - anyone who has travelled out of their home country will immediately notice that driving standards and habits vary the world over. Assume that every bad habit you've ever seen is imported into Dubai and you'll get the idea.
"This situation is terrible! Something must be done! The wrong thing is something! So we must do the wrong thing!"
It is something ...
LOL
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I didn't use Ad Hominem either, but I'll leave that one for you.
Listen, I'm not suggesting that texting and driving isn't distracting, or can't have a negative impact on driving. Of course it can. So can many other things. Many of these have been determined to be higher risk activities.
Looking at objects (or people) outside the car has been found to pose a greater risk than talking on a phone (the offense that you specifically appeared to be indignant about). Though dialing a phone is riskier than eating, eating is more risky than using a phone. Inserting or retrieving a CD is between eating and dialing.
And maybe you are right, and that you can fiddle with your CD or MP3 player in a few seconds, but my car has a 5 disc MP3 on DVD player that doesn't support playlists or random play, but does support browsing directories. On the other hand, I can send a text using my phone's microphone and text-to-speech. It is illegal for me to use speech-to-text in extremely slow moving traffic, yet it's legal for me to search for the right file, in the right folder, on the right DVD, with an extremely badly designed user interface, while driving 75 MPH.
Also, not all phones require 2 hands. Not all of them even require looking. Some people, on some phones, are able to type completely blind while keeping their eyes on the road.
There have been studies that show no reduction in crashes after banning phones while driving, even though phone use will driving did decrease. One has to wonder whether making it illegal means that some people will try harder to hide it, taking their eyes even further away from the road as they conceal their phones out of plain sight, such as down near their lap.
Studies show that hands-free devices aren't really any safer than holding it. Analysis suggests it is believed that the mental workload of holding the conversation is what increases risk, not the act of holding a phone.
While I think it is a bad idea to talk on a phone or text on it while driving, I am just skeptical of the legitimacy of the moral outrage for it, and wonder how other risks compare, and am skeptical of the need of additional legislation (or at least, the types being created).
But go ahead. Say I don't have a clue, just because I am not rushing to join the "there ought to be a law!" crowd.
This is the reason you dont have a clue. You didn't read my post and just substituted it with whatever you needed to in order to paint me as an alarmist. What I said was, there is good reason we ban phone use and not radio use.
This is also why you dont have a clue.
A lot of people think they can drive and text, in reality they can't. Please see Dunning-Kruger for an explanation.
It is impossible for a person to use a phone and concentrate on the road because a person only has one set of eyes and one brain. In order to do both activities at once these functions need to be time shared and doing that whilst driving is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
But go ahead, twist whatever I have said because it doesn't fit in with your view, It wont change the fact that using a phone whilst driving is incredibly dangerous.
Further more, I've passed defensive driving which is required to hold an MVDIL (Motor Vehicle Driver Instructors License), meaning I teach others how to drive safely, so I know a bit more about this then the average A to B commuter.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.