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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.
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"
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?????
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could it simply be that there's fewer accidents after 9 PM, regardless as to whether people are on the phone or not?
They looked at accident data before and after the "free minutes" were available. So they were not comparing 9PM to 6PM, but rather 9PM with free minutes to 9PM without free minutes.
Anyway, I find their conclusion hard to believe. I was in several near accidents while talking before I swore off using the phone while driving.
Their assumption is that the "free minutes" changed anyone's phone call habits or driving behaviour. This is a pretty bad assumption.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.