Slashdot Mirror
Talking On the Phone While Driving Not So Dangerous After All
Dorianny writes "New research which takes advantage of the increase in cell phone use after 9pm due to the popularity of 'free nights and weekends' plans showed no corresponding increase in crash rates (PDF). Additionally, the researchers analyzed the effects of legislation banning cellphone use, enacted in several states, and similarly found that the legislation had no effect on the crash rate. 'One thought is that drivers may compensate for the distraction of cellphone use by selectively deciding when to make a call or consciously driving more carefully during a call.' Score this a -1 for common sense."
You fuckers need to keep your hands on the God damn wheel.
You have limited infoprocessing resources. You spend some on a conversation, its less for driving. Conversations can be more distracting than ethanol. Its pretty simple. I've told my wife and kid to shut up when I'm concentrating on a new route. Know your limits.
I was ok when they banned talking on the cell phone, it was banning texting that really annoyed me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This jives pretty well with the study I have been showing everyone I can which actually studied the individuals who DO get in accidents with cell phones. What it found was that, as a group, they tended to get in more accidents than other drivers; even when not using cell phones!
Not only that but, while it has been found that most drivers using cell phones drive more cautiously; but these drivers in particular tended to drive LESS cautiously when distracted! This pretty clearly pointed to bad drivers with cell phones being more a judgement issue than a distraction issue.
So these findings are pretty unsurprising in light of that. It has been known for a while now that decreasing real phone usage doesn't change accident rates. NY state observed a 60% decrease in the number of drivers on the road observed to be using cell phones.... with no change in its accident rates.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Could it simply be that there's fewer accidents after 9 PM, regardless as to whether people are on the phone or not?
Call me crazy, but I always assumed more accidents took place during rush hour than after.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So you mean to tell me all those people in the passing lane, who are driving significantly slower than the speed limit, weaving from side to side within their lane, and have their head tilted over, looking down, with their cell phone clamped to their ear are safe drivers?????
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Then they came for the texters, but I didn't speak up because I never text and drive.
Then they came for me... And no one would pick up.
My old commute back in The Bay Area took me over the San Mateo Bridge.
I started working night-shift for awhile, and left early one morning (4am?) to find myself driving eastbound over the high span portion in very dense fog. It was like flying in space. It was awesome, and I have never been more attentive at the wheel.
Solution? Build roads inside space tunnels to prevent people from being bored.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Talking and texting while driving was made illegal. Accident rates didn't change. That doesn't say anything about how dangerous it is to talk or text while driving. Instead, it just says that the law is sporadically enforced, if at all, and universally ignored by drivers. Accident rates didn't change because talking/texting while driving rates also didn't change.
I question how much free minutes changed calling patterns, too. I suspect cell phone companies offered that feature knowing there would be little or no change in calling patterns and they would continue to make nearly all the money they already were before the change, indicating that people aren't taking advantage of free minute time windows.
they sure aren't likely to say that they used a cellphone when crashing that's for sure...
anyhow, driving while distracted is illegal in most countries for obvious reasons, no matter what the distraction. yet some douches read the newspaper while driving.
Driving while nattering on the phone is as common as dirt. Just because there's some legislation passed does not stop people from doing it. I can sit at a light and watch drivers go past and often more than 50% are holding a phone to their head with one hand. If they put up some cameras to record this and mail out the tickets it might change things a bit, particularly as insurers would be alerted as to who is a higher risk.
I've seen the darnedest things while driving - applying make-up, shaving (face, not legs or back hair), dogs running back and forth in a car (right across the driver's view) and lots and lots of nose-picking (don't follow too close, fred, they're liable to fling a booger on your windshield!)
I will say this, every time I've seen an accident or been hit in one, the other driver had a phone in their hand. I'm curious who funded this study.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The study makes no such assumptions. As the paper notes they use Carrier data to show a "7.2 percent jump in driver call likelihood at the 9pm threshold".
There's also another way to interpret the data—that the negative effects of using the phone more after 9 P.M. for fully awake drivers are cancelled out by the positive effects of ongoing interaction with another person helping keep sleepy drivers more alert. If this is the case, then banning cell phone use might actually cost lives....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Granted, me and Ol' Belle (may she rest in peace) have a biased opinion. But ending up upside down because some teenage twit thought what was happening on her phone was far more important that looking out the window does tend to skew your opinion.
T-boned at an intersection after she had a full 10 seconds of red light in front of her. She never bothered to look, and blew through the intersection at 50+.
" consciously driving more carefully during a call" is exactly what intoxicated drivers try to do.
You only have one job while you're driving. Drive the car. To do this, you have to watch out for other cars, be aware of road conditions, read signs along the road, watch for animals or humans crossing the road, monitoring your speed, etc. It's a lot to work on. You really even shouldn't daydream or let your mind wander - concentrate on the job at hand. If it's too boring, take the bus and stop endangering other people's lives.
planet texture maps and more
Meaning 100% of the entire time drunk drivers are driving they are drunk. Whereas the occasional phone call is in fact a random and rare thing for the most part. But the wider issue is cast ye the first phone and all that rot. I was in a car for mere minutes today - as a passenger and in 6 miles we saw one person wander across 4 lanes of traffic no signal. One person slammed on their brakes for zero reason. One person stop dead in the middle of a right turn for no reason. One person drove in the shoulder to pass us. And as far as we could tell no one was holding a phone.
I will say this, every time I've seen an accident or been hit in one, the other driver had a phone in their hand. I'm curious who funded this study.
After skimming the first couple pages, I'm a bit offended that this qualifies as a "scientific study."
Basically, the "researchers" looked at a couple of graphs, and said, "OOH! Look! A correlation! CORRELATION == CAUSATION!!! WE GEE-NYUS-SES!"
The crocodiles in Pearls Before Swine do better research.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I think about the amount of energy accumulated when I am driving. Even at moderate urban speeds it is an awesome amount of destructive force when dissipated rapidly. To minimize the chance that such an energy release will destroy yours truly I minimize distractions. I view it is a long statistical game played over decades. Even small degradations of capability will tell in the long run. I am not a complete Pearson's Puppeteer about this (otherwise I would probably avoid cars altogether), but I try to channel the attitude a bit. I have always done my best to fully concentrate on the road. The fact that I have driven in many places where driving culture is quite crude and rude -- Eastern Europe, Asia -- has, I will confess, helped to concentrate my mind. As I see the crap that other people do in their cars, especially lately with all the cool new tech, I really am starting to get impatient for the robots to take over. With roughly 30,000 dead on our highways every year they can hardly do worse. In fact chimps could hardly do worse.
Mr Brin, Mr Page I know you are both quite busy. But, um, can you get on with it? Please?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Just to list a few:
For starters this is a retrospective, observational (being generous here) cohort study.
I'd like a bit more technical detail on how they ensured that they were measuring mobile calls from cars (they have assurance from the telecommunications company)
They note a 7% rise in what they believe to be car mobile phone calls at 9pm on Monday to Friday on a background of steadily decreasing phone calls from 8pm to 10pm, and they don't mention whether this spike is statistically significant.
The spike in the rise of mobile car use is of a maximum of 1/2 hour before the level reaches pre-9pm levels, and continues to decrease. This interval is short - to notice an effect the recording of the car accidents in their source would have to be pretty precise. Any errors in the reporting of car accidents is probably going to make a 30 min window period difficult to measure.
They haven't analysed the variation in traffic at different times in the evening, which makes comparison at different time periods difficult. If the traffic is less after 9pm, the rate of accidents per car could be higher.
But the main problem is:
To show 'no effect' you need to ensure that your study is powered to make this observation - which they have not done. A 7% rise in mobile usage over 30 minutes would need ?how many crashes to give a statistically significant result that rises above the noise.
To be fair, they mention some of these issues as caveats, but I'm not sure they had enough statistics input for this paper. I would like to see the confidence intervals, how they were calculated, what software was used and what the p-values are. There should be a statisticians name on the paper. Certainly, you can't conclude that mobile phones are not dangerous while driving - you can only say that they found no evidence to show this in this particular study.
I believe that that friend of mine was quite trained in driving + reading and knew exactly when to put down the book and when to continue. So, he could not be really distracted from driving while reading.
I agree: talking to passengers while driving doesn't distract me, but talking on the phone *does* - so I don't pick-up the phone either. I rather find a stop, halt the car and then call back if the caller seemed some "important" person (my wife, daughter, etc...)
In fact, knowing your limits is one of the key things I learned while taking driving lessons in Germany. My teacher would say: "You *always* need to have reserves: gasoline, water, your speed [never drive top-speed], and your own energy and concentration. If you are at your limits, stop!"
That's probably the one best recommendation he gave that I will never forget...
As a point of interest, statistically it seems to be about 96-98% can't. It depends on which study you look at. Of the more activity-specific ones I've read, the incidence of people whose driving performance was not significantly impaired while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a remote party has been around 2-4%.
Some of the studies suggested that the same subjects also tend to exhibit their extraordinary ability to perform multiple simultaneous activities effectively in other contexts. Curiously, so far there seems little evidence of correlation between this ability and other factors we might expect to be relevant, such as other measures of intelligence.
If anyone here is a real psychologist with experience of the field, please feel free to chime in with more concrete data, as the above is just based on some personal research as an interested observer.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Check out Figure 1 of the PDF. Minor annoyances: there is no legend, and one line label occurs where two lines are on top of each other. Major WTH: the green dashed "All Crashes" line is clearly taller than the blue dotted "Fatal Crashes" line until about 2004 when the number of Fatal Crashes became more than the All Crashes figure for the next 12 months. I stopped reading the PDF at this point.
I come here for the love
Please explain how this "study" corrected for the difference in traffic conditions between rush hour/daytime driving and driving on weekends and after 9:00pm.
On second thought, don't bother. This "study" isn't worthy of the effort.
Check out my novel.
San Francisco recently built a boulevard, Octavia Blvd, in the Western Addition neighborhood. It was the first one built in the country for several decades.
Interestingly, there are _no_ traffic signs telling you what you can and can't do. Center lane traffic regularly crosses the service lanes, which seems ridiculously dangerous. (Note, this is different from transitioning between service and center lane. And I always transition a block ahead of time and turn right from the service lane.)
I researched the CalTrans project sites and committee reports and learned that CalTrans _intentionally_ left the traffic rules uncodified. Turning from the center lane, even when the service lane has a green light, is absolutely legal. Other than regular traffic light and stop sign rules, and the no left turn from center lane boulevard signs, the only official rule is to not drive stupid.
Apparently it's an experiment in the recent theory that when people are unsure and confused, they tend to slow down, and in many circumstances the accident rate will drop. People turning from the center lane are very attentive. And people are also exceptionally attentive when crossing the intersection using the service lane. Both people are scared that some idiot will ram into them.
Octavia Blvd appears to be uncharacteristically safe given the amount of traffic it carries.
However, the transition from freeway to the boulevard, which crosses Market St at grade level, has been a death trap for pedestrians, perhaps precisely because it's free of obstructions and confusion and people feel safe driving too fast.
There's also another way to interpret the data—that the negative effects of using the phone more after 9 P.M.
Or that phone usage has not actually dropped, it's only the law that has changed.
It's like when speed zones change. A council on my route recently changed a speed zone from 60 KPH to 70 KPH after the completion of a new roundabout, however 90% of drivers are still doing 60 because they wont change their habits. People have always done 60 down that road, so they'll keep doing it.
for fully awake drivers are cancelled out by the positive effects of ongoing interaction with another person helping keep sleepy drivers more alert. If this is the case, then banning cell phone use might actually cost lives....
This is utter bollocks.
A tired driver has already had their abilities reduced. Fatigue is the thrid biggest killer behind speed and drugs and alcohol and the biggest cause of accidents after drugs and alcohol. The problem with using a mobile phone whilst driving is that it distracts the driver. The driver has their attention taken off the road and put onto another task, what is worse is that the driver prioritises this other task over driving.
Talking on the phone will just inhibit a driver further. So not only will they be tired, they will be tired and distracted. If you're too tired to drive, you need to pull over and get out of the car. Fatigue wont be fixed by distracting the driver even more, stop, have a cup of tea and stretch your legs.
Distracted driving has always been the problem and being on the phone distracts drivers even more, this has been proven in multiple tests, so the study in the article can easily be explained by people ignoring the law.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This is an excellent 30 minute documentary about texting and driving - very moving.
It really depends on the study you're looking at. Most of them measure responses on a difficult driving course while being asked cognitive questions. The participants are either judged for their answers, or given the impression that they are. Meanwhile they're swerving to lights or slamming on the brakes. They have no opportunity to answer the quiz questions except when they are in imminent driving hazards.
Real driving doesn't work that way. Not nearly. You are constantly on the lookout for unusual road / pedestrian behavior, but most of your brain is sitting there idle. If something does happen, you already know that the conversation has no preemptive value whatsoever. During the test, if you're not answering verbal questions in mid-panic, you're failing that part of the test. In real life, you deal with the driving issue, and then return to the conversation, "What did you say again, I was just swerving to miss a deer."
I was screaming at my television when the Myth Busters "confirmed" this (for instance). They needed a double blind study where the participants were lead to believe there was something else entirely being tested (such as fuel efficiency, with very few reaction events... in other words, make it like driving!!! Don't tell them you're measuring their driving skills, lead them to believe that you're not. Only then can you even begin to tackle the issue.
Most of these studies are designed around the biases that are extraordinarily prevalent in this thread. "I could pull it off, but most people are idiots. We need legislation to control the idiots."* It is a form of conceit. It produces a pre-formed conclusion in search of a study designed to confirm it. And if there's one thing that our universities can produce right now, it's studies that confirm preconceived beliefs. That makes it easier to get funding for future studies, after all.
*(This is an example of the logical fallacy of permitting the exception to prove the rule.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.