25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use 317
BogenDorpher writes "In a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association (PDF), driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all US car accidents. It is common knowledge that driving while distracted is not a safe thing to do, but now we have some scientific data that goes in-depth on the topic. From the article: '"Despite all that has been written about driver distraction, there is still a lot that we do not know. Much of the research is incomplete or contradictory. Clearly, more studies need to be done addressing both the scope of the problem and how to effectively address it," said GHSA Executive Director Barbara Harsha.'"
Re:But has it increased by 25%? (Score:4, Informative)
Does this mean that the number of car accidents has increased by 25? If not, what improvements have cancelled out the increase in accidents caused by cellphones and other gadgets? Are there fewer accidents caused by people fiddling for CDs in the glove compartment or trying to find a good AM channel? Are there fewer accidents caused by frustrated people trying to find their way on a fold-out map?
Hi, it's my first day here, so I read TFA and TFP. The paper addresses these issues:
Wilson and Stimpson (2010) compared trends in distracted driving fatalities recorded in FARS with trends in cell phone subscriptions and text message volume. They observed that distracted driving fatalities and text messaging both increased substantially from 2005 to 2008. Their multivariate regression analysis estimated that increased texting since 2001 produced over 16,000 additional traffic fatalities.
Fowles et al. (2010) studied the effects of cell phones on fatality rates from a “classical econometric” and quite technical point of view. They considered the effects of broad social and economic variables such as beer consumption, proportion of young males, seat belt laws, and the number of cell phone subscribers on annual fatality rates from 1980 to 2004. They concluded that fatality rates increased as cell phones first began to be used, then decreased as cell phone use rose, and finally increased again more recently. They attributed the positive effect of cell phones in the middle period to their use to call for emergency assistance at a crash. Now that cell phones are almost universal, their negative effects in distracting drivers overcome these positive effects. “The bottom line is that cell phones now have an adverse effect on motor vehicle fatality rates.”