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More Than 1 In 4 Car Crashes Involve Cellphone Use
schwit1 (797399) writes "Texting and driving is dangerous but a new survey finds talking on a cellphone while behind the wheel may be even worse. The National Safety Council's annual report found 26 percent of all crashes are tied to phone use, but noted just 5 percent involved texting. Safety advocates are lobbying now for a total ban on driver phone use, pointing to studies that headsets do not reduce driver distraction."
Some people are more prone to be in / cause an accident period. Distracted driving increases the likelyhood of an accident, be it texting, be-bopping to music, talking on the phone, enjoying the company of the fellow passengers, or just plain dealing with kids.
There's a reason the pilot of a plane is sectioned away from the screaming babies.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
not the holding of the device, as anybody who'd thought this through even for a second was saying back when "hands-free" was being touted as a safety feature.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
The main question is if the total accident rate has increased since cell phones became ubiquitous. As far as I know the answer is "no", the accident rate actually went down. "Tied to" doesn't mean "caused", or "increased the chance of". Usually "tied to" is a lazy qualifier from a lazy researcher or journalist.
Most people can't drive properly and legally as it is.
You know what is more dangerous than cellphones in cars? Breast. No lie.
It is a fact that in over 50% of all accidents there were at LEAST 2 breasts in the car at the time. Often times 4 or more! Breasts are twice as likely to be involved in any accident that cellphone or penises. I call for an immediate ban on breasts in moving vehicles. They can be near them while the car is at rest, preferably at a car show, both otherwise they more dangerous than drunk driving!!!
That's, of course, unless you want to actually use statistics for something other than alarmism.
Actually better done and accurate studies would be even better.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What I want to know is what percentage of accidents involve at least one vehicle containing at least one passenger beyond the driver of that vehicle. I don't know for certain, but I'd imagine it's something up around 80%-90% or more. I think it's pretty safe to assume that if there is a passenger in the car, the driver probably spends at least some of their concentration paying attention to that person and/or talking to them. Just think of it, we could eliminate almost ALL accidents if we just outlawed the carrying of passengers... /s
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
If you'd bothered to RTFA where they explain the research and the methodology, it would have answered your questions... Yes, it's based on actual "good studies" and no, it's not just a guess.
Here's a clue for the clueless: McEvoy et al (2005); Redelmeier & Tibshirani (1997)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This is the same bad statistics that gets repeated every 3 or 4 months on Slashdot, from some stupid newspaper article.
Looking at the number of accidents involving phones tells you nothing.
It could be that a greater proportion of non-accident journeys involved phones.
It could be that the accident rate would be higher without the phones because people are taking more care driving to compensate for operating a phone.
How about taking a random sampling of car journeys and seeing the relative prevalence of phone use between accident and non-accident car journeys? It would have to be a very large study because the accident rate relative to the car-journey rate is very low. It would have to be a random sampling from a larger sample population to suppress confounding effects.
Good statistics over human behaviors with small effects is very hard to do because it requires big studies. But we know exactly how to do it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
My android phone does this.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
60% of accidents could be eliminated if people would stop using cellphones, texting and driving drunk.
That assumes that cellphones, texting, and driving drunk were the causal elements in the accidents and not just contributing or correlated with. I.e., I'm talking on a cellphone when an 18 wheeler runs a red light and t-bones me. Would not being on the cellphone have prevented that accident? Probably not.
And it also ignores the fact that eliminating some causal elements doesn't mean it eliminates the accidents altogether. I'm using a cellphone and am distracted, crash. Prohibit cellphone use, I may switch my attention to my new dash-mounted Sirius/XM radio and be flipping through the channels when I run into someone. If I'm someone who tends to allow distractions of one kind, I probably will be distracted and continue to allow distractions of other kinds.
The NSC cites McEvoy et al (2005); Redelmeier & Tibshirani (1997) as the source for the 1 in 4 stat. I don't see a ref Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram S. Pathania (2013) http://tech.slashdot.org/story.... Correlation does not mean causation, folks. Let's not forget that.
You are an idiot.
Women between the ages of 30 and 50 (i.e. mothers) have the lowest fatality and accident rates of any other age or gender group.
See here as one example of easily obtainable information: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topic...
--
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cheers, ben
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We need to replant trees by the sides of roads. You know, the ones they dug out because drivers kept hitting them. This will give inattentive drivers something better to crash into than other road users, hopefully removing only one set of DNA from the gene pool.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
"When you PRY it from my COLD, DEAD... oh, yeah. Well, never mind. Carry on and all that."
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Never been known to fail..."
This is a very stupid and misleading statistic. I've seen statements like this on Slashdot before, and in my local paper, so I did look up the numbers, and the accident and fatality rates have both been dropping steadily since before handheld cell phones even existed. Almost 100% of the population has cell phones, and they are being used in some manner or another off and on continuously throughout the day. So of course they are being used during a significant number of accidents, because they're being used during a significant number of miles driven.
If cell phones are a significant cause of accidents, the numbers would very clearly show it, yet they don't. So the best anyone can come up to throw at us is this kind of misleading garbage. 100% of all the accidents I have ever been in involved contacts to correct eye vision. Obviously my contacts are a major problem then?
Better known as 318230.
Studies have addressed the puzzling fact that there is a correlation between cell phone talking but no correlation to be found with talking to a passenger. The dominant theory is that the passenger is within the same context as the driver, so if something happens around the car that requires the driver's attention it does not seem odd to the passenger that they stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.. and the passenger does not start saying "hello?? are you there?".
In the case of the radio, attention is optional. Media on the radio is highly repetitive with the assumption that you may have had lapses in attention.
Many magic tricks work based upon how predictably easy it is to distract humans.
Passengers are also paying some attention and CAN more than compensate for the distraction they create. (NOTE: I used the word "can.")
It only takes an instant of looking at the wrong place to miss the magic trick. Same with driving except the result is not enjoyable.
Many of the stereo systems I've seen are a disaster, you could die just trying to change the station and when new they have too much of a learning curve - plus all those blinking lights designed to SELL it like a bait for a fish.
I've missed many accidents over the years and I had a mix of Cell phone, Brats, and airhead teenage boys almost get me. The phone being the only one where it's 100% the user's fault for putting others at risk. They should be punished for reckless endangerment because that is exactly what it is! brats need driving around and teen boys can't help themselves but a cell user could WAIT like everybody used to do not that long ago.
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Back in the 70s the same people would say cigarette smoking caused crashes because a large % of drivers smoked. Studies have shown that talking on a cell phone is as 'distracting' as talking to somebody else in the car. And given the exuberance to ban cell phone use, can we tackle the most serious problem facing drivers?
Last I checked driving fatalities have been on a downward slope forever. Please stop the safety nanny crowd before it is too late.
Damn straight. Maybe we could revive the old Norse code - it's only murder if you try to hide it. Announce it to everyone and it's just a killing - you pay wereguild to their family to avoid retribution and life goes on. But if you try to hide it and get caught you get declared a "wolf in hallowed places" (literal translation) and it's open season for anyone who want to take a shot at you.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That is per crash, not per mile driven, I believe.
Per mile driven favors males as ~10% safer.
Here's a question: Would the black box tell you how many of these accidents would have happened even if there was no cell phone involved? If so, let's see it. (I honestly don't know.)
As it is, this one in four figure is useless, and all it does is add to the fire for people who just like to bitch about other people using cell phones (I know people who bitch about other people using cell phones while walking or even sitting, which poses no harm to anybody.)
Why is it useless? Well, today we happen to have a lot more cell phones around than we used to, namely because cell phone services are both A) more popular B) much cheaper than they used to be. More people have and use phones, so more people are going to be doing other things with them while they use them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. You're equally well off in saying that talking on a cell phone is more likely to cause you to get outside for some fresh air if you happen to walk outside while talking on a cell phone.
Here's the $64 question: If a quarter of accidents happen to occur while somebody is using a cell phone, does that also mean that accidents are up 25% above when nobody had cell phones? Because I never heard that figure anywhere in here. Even if that is in there, there could be other factors coming into play, i.e. more cars being on the road now than there were then.
Until that is determined, sensationalist figures like these are more harmful than helpful. Why? Because stupid politicians make their careers off of adding new laws that get more people put into jail and/or fined without actually providing any benefit to anybody other than satisfying people who just can't stand the sight of seeing somebody else having a conversation that they aren't a part of.
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People who are good at thinking clearly about statistics don't often find their way into the telling-other-people-what-to-do business, sadly.
Here's a question: Would the black box tell you how many of these accidents would have happened even if there was no cell phone involved? If so, let's see it. (I honestly don't know.)
Given that driving using a mobile phone seriously inhibits your ability to concentrate on driving and that the main cause of accidents is driver error, its a very good assumption.
Far better than the assumption that they would have had the accident anyway.
Your strawman depends on no other factors being involved. It's like claiming drivers are safer since the 80's because fatalities have reduced, this completely ignores the advent and rise of ABS, the seatbelt pre-tensioner as well as crackdowns on speed and drunk driving (and awareness campaigns on driver fatigue).
The figures aren't sensationalist when they're true.
And if they help morons on phones realise that they are morons for being on the phone whilst driving, it's extremely helpful.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I don't see a solid definition of what constitutes a crash involving a cell phone.
If the phone is strapped to the dashboard streaming music with the screen off... does that count? The phone is "in use"
If I'm driving and my passenger is texting... and someone runs a red light, hitting us. Does that constitute a crash involving a cell phone?
If my phone is providing turn by turn directions for me, does that make the cut?
If I'm stopped a a red light and talking on my phone, when someone rear ends me...?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
Ambiguous syntax implies intentionally loose constraints, imo.
This signature is false.
Well, that statistic is not very useful because it does not take into account many biaises. It is not clear that male and female have the smae driving hours. If male were to drive more during peak hours, it would be logical that they tend to get into more accidents and more fatal accidents.
Not that GP was not a complete douche, but let's not use statistics to say what they do not say.
Far better than the assumption that they would have had the accident anyway.
The figures aren't sensationalist when they're true.
They aren't true. They are meaningless. I have a friend who is a real estate
agent who is always on his phone when he is in the car. Close to 100%.
Extrapolating out these meaningless statitics to 100% it would mean that
if everybody constantly talked on their phones while in the car like my friend
then 100% of all accidents are caused by cell phone use.
These stats are the equivalent of saying 1 in 4 accidents involve the radio
or 1 in 4 accidents involve someone drinking a soft drink while driving.
People talk on cell phones, listen to the radio, and drink soft drinks while
driving but that doesn't mean any of the 3 cause a 25% increase in accidents
anymore than saying 25% of accidents involve passengers means that
the passengers are a direct cause of the accidents.
(I know people who bitch about other people using cell phones while walking or even sitting, which poses no harm to anybody.)
Yes, people like myself who have had to dodge one too many chatterboxes that think it's okay to just step into the street in front of someone riding a bicycle. After all, Brenda has a new boyfriend and she met him on Craigslist ... ewwww!
The fact is that people are too, "well that's only other people, that's not me!" and then they proceed to dial a phone call that could have easily waited until back at the office parking lot or whatever. The false sense of urgency people have simply because they can is getting ridiculous. I can accept that probably 1% of phone calls are actually urgent. What I can't accept is the 75% of calls that people think are ugent. What's the old saying, "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part." Until it is determined that people will behave responsibly, other people will want to legislate that irresponsible behavior away from them. I don't think it has anything to do with "not being a part of their conversation" but rather that people would prefer to live in a world where they aren't surrounded by people chatting casually on a phone and being oblivious to the world around them.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This is a page out of MADD's playbook.
Accident report forms are used to collect statistical data. Like a game of Telephone, as you get further from the event, the more the "data" reflects the currently prevailing biases.
Here is an example, one that has been documented by researchers trying to figure out where bullshit MADD claims were coming from:
Drunk pedestrian steps out in front of a car, gets hit and killed. The "Fatality" box gets checked, of course. The pedestrian's alcohol box also gets checked.
Now a researcher comes along and compiles them into alcohol-involved vs alcohol-free.
Then a second researcher comes along and looks at the alcohol-involved accidents and counts how many of them were fatalities. Sadly, this guy doesn't bother looking at the primary data, he just assumes that the alcohol involved was in the blood of the driver that caused the accident.
Bam! A drunk pedestrian has morphed into a drunk driver. And since there is lots of money to be had by producing statistics that support neo-prohibition, and none to speak of for honest research, the "researchers" are rewarded for their apathy.
Now imagine a checkbox on the accident report form labelled "cell phone present"...
See that "Preview" button?
You ever tried driving one of the high-fidelity simulators (rFactor, etc) that let you record a professional-grade analysis of your driving? Given the known effects of alcohol on the human nervous system I find it *highly* unlikely that you drive as well drunk as sober, though there may be a "sweet spot" where your sense of flow is amplified enough to more than offset your reduced reaction times - I've certainly noticed such an effect myself. Provided of course nothing unexpected happens (one of the benefits of a racing simulator over a real road filled with a never-ending supply of reckless idiots)
My own observations have been that my lap times may improve considerably while intoxicated, at least when I'm "on", but my crashes are likewise far more... cinematic shall we say. And frequent. And not infrequently rather embarrassing - for example missing a full-throttle curve when distracted by a passing thought. There's a reason I don't drive real cars if I've had a few.
And if you don't think you're drunk then you're probably one of the people I wouldn't trust behind the wheel - recognizing just how impaired you are, despite the lack of obvious symptoms, seems to be a good 0-th order approximation of your ability to behave responsibly under the influence. Unless you're a metabolic freak your reflexes *are* severely impaired - if you're not aware of that then it means your judgement is severely impaired as well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you gather the data, from say the National Highway Safety Administration (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/), you will see that in spite of there being more cars on the road, there are HALF as many deaths from car accidents in 2012 as there were in 1970 (when almost no one had a car phone). This is an amazing number, because the other half of the coin is there are nearly 10x as many people driving. The figures for injuries follow. Yes, there are dozens of reasons for this, including better car safety, slower speeds (i.e. traffic jams), seat belt use, etc. But that does not matter: our safety increases anyway!
Therefore, because it has the effect of invalidating the entire discussion, the inconvenient data was neglected. I have the same issue as "alcohol related accidents", they set blood-alcohol thresholds pretty arbitrarily and are constantly lowering them based on reactions, not based on scientific study.
"They aren't true. They are meaningless"
We are to believe YOU over the National Safety Counsel...why? Citations please.
Jack of all trades,master of none
As it is, this one in four figure is useless, and all it does is add to the fire for people who just like to bitch about other people using cell phones (I know people who bitch about other people using cell phones while walking or even sitting, which poses no harm to anybody.)
I know this is anecdotal, but I'd say 80% of the close-calls I've had whilst riding my motorcycle were caused by folks talking on their phone, completely oblivious to me in the lane next to them. The nice thing about a bike is I can move out of the way quickly and safely, and I also sit as high or higher than 90% of drivers on the road - and can see in to their car really easy to see them texting or talking and look up startled as I honk and swerve... I've even turned in video footage (I have a helmet cam) to drivers who were especially egregious - hard to deny you were texting/talking when there is a good chunk of video proving it.
Distracted driving - of which phones are a major contributor because it is interactive (usually 2 way communication, as compared to the one way of a broadcast radio/satellite/CD source) - is a serious danger. If something is SO IMPORTANT that you have to talk on the phone NOW - then pull over. Thirty seconds won't kill you - but it might kill someone else.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
According to page 43 of this study, men drive about 50% more miles per year than women.
The GP's link shows that men account for 2.5x as many traffic fatalities.
So men are clearly still worse according to these statistics. But why trust these numbers? Insurance companies make their money by having teams of extremely smart, highly trained statisticians pore over more data than you'll see in a lifetime, and they charge women less. I don't see how anyone could rationally argue that women are worse drivers while knowing that fact.
Women have more more accidents overall and much more likely to have an injury accident than men per mile driven (source). Males, particularly young males are much more likely to take risks than females. Young males are 2.1 more likely to be in a fatal accident but the rates start converging and by age 60 there isn't a difference in the fatal accident rate. But for non-fatal accidents females consistently are more likely to be involved. I couldn't find any data on insurance rates by gender, do you have a source for that?
Enigma
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/P...
An NHSTA sponsored study says at any given moment during the day, 5% of Americans are driving while using a cell phone.. The study has some caveats - it relied on phone surveys, visual road-side observations, and only goes up to 2011, so may be significantly under-reporting cell phone usage. I estimate that number is closer to 10% based on casual observation while driving. So in a two -car accident that gives a 10% chance of a cell phone used in one of the cars. If the real cell-phone usage number is closer to 15%, then the 26% number is meaningless as it's typical of the overall population regardless of cell phone use.
When I see a stupid driving move, the person is invariably holding a cell phone to their face, talking and gesticulating wildly while they're the only person in the vehicle (hands-free), looking down at something (texting or dialing), or it's a woman putting on makeup while driving.
Sadly, there are still a lot of people who will claim that even in cases like you describe, the phone had nothing to do with the bad driving.
I'll share a personal anecdote from yesterday. I was driving on some back streets on my way to a friend's house, the kind of roads where cars are parked down both sides so you've only got space for one car at a time in between (traffic can't pass in opposite directions without someone pulling over to give way).
As I'm coming up to a crossroads, someone in a 4x4, a big vehicle that is difficult to fit down these roads at the best of times, is coming the other way. Then they just stop, right in the middle of the road, blocking it completely, take out their phone and start making a call.
Now, I was the other side of the junction at that point, but clearly visible maybe 30m from the other vehicle, and my position and lack of turn signals implied that I was waiting to go down that road. They didn't even notice me for about half a minute.
When they eventually did, they pulled forward a bit to where there was a gap in the parked cars on one side (still chatting away on their phone) and started trying to reverse back into the space (still on the phone). I watched in horror as they came within probably an inch of the parked car just in front. Now, sure, they could have just been very good at manoeuvring their vehicle, but they'd have to be a pretty amazing driver to pass that close when at no point during the entire manoeuvre did they even look in that direction. Then they bumped up the kerb. Good thing the mother walking along the pavement with a pushchair had seen them and stopped well back, then. The driver proceeded to shuffle their vehicle around for probably another two minutes, chatting away throughout, until eventually they were far enough into the space that I could safely get past (though somehow they still managed to be nearly a foot away from the kerb, so good thing I was only a car trying to get past rather than something larger like an ambulance or fire engine, I guess).
It is a requirement for reaching driving test standard in the UK that a driver can perform that manoeuvre. If I'd been doing it in my car, I would have been off the road and into the space in maybe ten seconds, plus however long I'd had to wait to let the lady with the pushchair pass first just to be safe.
But I'm sure that just makes me the world's best driver and the guy in the 4x4 was just lucky to pass his test. Being on the phone surely had nothing to do with his apparent lack of awareness of other road users, a serious hazard on the pavement, or the position of other vehicles close to his own. And I'm sure his utter incompetence at getting his tank into the space (well, almost into the space, kind of, if we're being generous) had nothing to do with performing the whole manoeuvre one-handed or, at a few times, two-handed but with his head cocked at an angle to hold the phone so he couldn't look around instead.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Here's a question: Would the black box tell you how many of these accidents would have happened even if there was no cell phone involved? If so, let's see it. (I honestly don't know.)
Given that driving using a mobile phone seriously inhibits your ability to concentrate on driving and that the main cause of accidents is driver error, its a very good assumption.
Far better than the assumption that they would have had the accident anyway.
Not necessarily. The report in question is an estimate based on previous studies, including one from 2005 which originally suggested the 1 in 4 number. That 2005 paper decided that cell phone usage was "associated" with the accident if the phone was being used up to 10 minutes before the crash. So in other words, an accident was counted if a driver had a brief conversation, hung up the phone, put it away, drove five miles, and then was hit by someone running a red light. It's pretty easy to see that this accident would likely still have happened without the phone usage. What's not clear is what percentage of the accidents are like this.