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Comments
That is where you are wrong. We ARE getting laws, though weak, they are laws against certain cell phone abuses. I'm sure, unless you get down to Olympia, that Washington is not far behind on the cell phone ban.
More on the turning in aggressive drivers in Canada:
Community members and motorists are asked to complete a Citizen Report Form when they observe a motorist demonstrating unsafe driving behavior. The forms must be signed and made as complete as possible.
This signed form helps safeguard the system against abuse. This is for statistical use only and is held in the strictest of confidence by the police service. The completed forms are placed in one of many secure drop boxes that are conveniently located throughout the community at participating and/or sponsoring business and/or organizations.
The Citizen Report Forms can also be faxed to your local police service. The completed forms are picked up on a regular basis and are verified by the police for accuracy. The police will send an "information letter" to the registered vehicle owner explaining that their vehicle was observed being operated in an unsafe manner at a specific time and location and asking for voluntary compliance.
If the vehicle owner was not driving their vehicle it is their responsibility to speak with the person driving the vehicle. If the vehicle owner wishes they can contact the police to discuss the incident. If further Citizen Report Forms are received on the same vehicle further letters will be written to the registered vehicle owner and personal contact by the police will be made.
http://www.roadwatch.ca/how_roadwatch_works2.htm
At the intersection with Ames Lake Road, an oncoming Subaru that was stopped in the left-turn lane suddenly turned, crashing into Mercer and flinging his body 100 feet in the air.
The femur in his left thigh was smashed. "There were bone fragments all over the hood and the road," he said. "But I got real lucky that I didn't sever an artery."
The driver who hit Mercer received a failure-to-yield ticket, a simple traffic infraction with a $133 fine. Witnesses told Mercer the driver didn't see him because he was distracted by his cell phone, but the police report doesn't mention it.
Accidents like Mercer's raise unanswered questions: Are cell phones causing carnage on the roads? And will we ever know how often these collisions occur and their toll to society?
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found a four fold increase in the risk of an accident for people who drive while phoning -- the same risk as driving with a 0.08 blood alcohol level, the legal limit.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/199825_celldrive16.html
Crash data: Wrong number?
The counterargument is that cell phones contribute to far more accidents than has been documented so far.
"The current collection of data isn't tremendously accurate," says Matt Sundeen, a program principal with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Why? Because few drivers will admit to being on the phone during a collision. Only 17 states collect cell phone data in collisions, and even in ones that do, individual officers decide how to investigate a collision.
A telling example is California, where the state Highway Patrol began tracking the role of phones in collisions at the request of the Legislature. In the first nine months of 2001, the patrol said cell phones could be blamed in 913 accidents, resulting in three fatalities and 423 injuries.
But the Los Angeles Times analyzed the same data and found that drivers using cell phones caused 4,699 collisions, killing 31 people and injuring 2,786 others.
That made cell phones the leading cause of distracted-driving accidents there (11 percent). The CHP commissioner, who had previously lobbied against a bill banning the use of hand-held phones while driving, decided to support the bill, though it has yet to be passed.
Nor is it common for crash investigators to request drivers' calling records unless there's a death or witnesses say someone was using a cell phone. Pulling those records requires a warrant from a judge, and it takes up to a month to get them.
People opposed to driving and phoning say society should control the behavior, much the way we require people to wear seat belts or, as in 38 states, prohibit TVs viewable by drivers. They say phones (and laptops, PDAs, Blackberries, driver-viewable DVD players, etc.) used in moving vehicles are a greater menace than other distractions.
Using a cell phone is manual -- turning on, dialing or answering, and holding it if no hands-free equipment is used -- as well as visual and auditory. But more importantly, it takes one's attention away from the road and the vehicle.
"People just really don't have any idea how serious the distraction is," said Lisa Sheikh, volunteer director of The Partnership for Safe Driving, a non-profit group working toward crash prevention. "People think that because they've done it before and they haven't crashed, they're fine."
Where is this statistic that half of all accidents are caused by drunk drivers? In AZ, they are involved in 5.49% of all accidents.
http://www.azdot.gov/mvd/statistics/crash/05crashfacts.pdf
In fact, according to NHTSA, they only make up 5% during the week and 12% on the weekend.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSF2004/809905.pdf
I find it hilarious that you want more than fluff but pull statistics out of thin air.
There will be no enforceable "ban", just as there will be no ban on smoking and eating and playing with in car gadgets and yelling at kids.
Ooh, letters and personal contact by police. Scary! There are absolutely no realistic safeguards against abuse. That little idea is a joke, just proof that at times Canada can piss away resources as well as the US.
Not that I don't have full faith in a newspaper or a law enforcement (revenue collection) agency to interpret data in a nonpartisan way.
No work done at all about other distractions. I wonder how many crashes are caused via addictions to tobacco and coffee? Maybe you can google me some articles on that.
Gee whiz, I forgot to include the word "fatal." According to this report from NHTSA, 39% of fatal accidents during 2004 involved alcohol. NHTSA report This percentage has been falling -- back in the "good old days", this rate was closer to about half.
So back to that -- are drivers on phones killing off the other half or so? Do you really believe that the two are comparable, when no data comes even close to such an estimate?
Is carnage the only benchmark? Does someone really have to get killed for it to be a problem? Here we have roads with four lanes and a right turn lane. Cars with cell phone drivers routinely fly down the right turn lane, slow to about 5 MPH and run the red if they think they can make it. If there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk, the driver frantically hits the brakes and barely stops in time.
This is routine. Is this not a problem because the driver doesn't hit the pedestrian?
So come out and say it, you pulled it out of thin air. The data does not support 50%.
So back to that -- are drivers on phones killing off the other half or so? Do you really believe that the two are comparable, when no data comes even close to such an estimate?
Again I ask, why is carnage and death the only benchmark?
Interesting but that is a lot of ifs. Fund a study and then I'll consider it. I think it's laughable that you won't take cell phone drivers being equated to drunk drivers , but you pull statistics and percentages out of thin air when it suits you.
Now you're being pedantic. I never claimed that it was 50% (I don't provide hard numbers without support), I said that it was "about half." 4/10ths is pretty close to "about" 5/10ths, for the sake of this discussion.
The real point was not to dwell on the exact percentage, but to illustrate the utter absurdity of equating phone usage to drunk driving, when the results are nowhere even close to one another.
We all know that phones are not killing off 5/10ths, 4/10ths or anything close to that proportion of people on our roads. The DUI-phone analogy is just lame, because it completely overstates the issue by several multiples, and is obviously intended to be sensational and headline-generating, despite the lack of comparability.
So the driver on the cell phone just wandering across lanes on the highway nearly causing several accidents doesn't count? Someone actually has to get hurt first? Think of how many people that would get drunk and then drive if the laws were like that for drunk driving.
Not really. LilEngineer makes the point (accurately) that those conducting studies (a) incentivize their subjects to deliver a best-case scenario "base case", and then test it against (b) a scenario created by the tester that may neither be realistic, nor an accurate reflection of the sorts of situations that the subject might subject himself to when not being prompted by the tester.
The tester is deliberately trying to create a best-case to compare against a worst case, which necessarily increases the spread and manipulates the result. The percentages were obviously meant for the sake of illustrating an analogy meant to explain the problem, but the flaws of the underlying methodology are clear.
The real point was not to dwell on the exact percentage, but to illustrate the utter absurdity of equating phone usage to drunk driving, when the results are nowhere even close to one another.
#1: I cannot debate something with someone who will accept a >10% error in their own statistics and then blame someone else because they don't like the wording in a study
#2: You don't know what drunk driving is? You find it impossible to know what it means that a cell phone driver is as bad as a drunk driver? Just because the poorly collected statistics don't show as much fatality (which is absurd to artificially limit the types of accidents) does not mean that they are not as impaired as drunk drivers.
Quit brushing it off. Twice now you have invented statistics to support your claim but discard a real world study that doesn't support your view.
Let's try this again -- if phone usage and drunk driving are equivalent, then show us some concrete examples of how this manifests itself in real life. Just one.
It has been found presented and ignored by at least a couple posters. Fortunately not the CA legislature as we will have a law against cell phones. Though I have already admitted it is a weak law. Maybe Washington will see the light and give you a law with some teeth. Always the optimist, that's me.
Are we back to those 20-sample simulator studies paid for by the insurance industry again?
Come now, the request being made here is for real-world accident data, based upon actual events, and not bought and paid for by the insurance lobby.
Honestly, why not just humor us and provide it? Or is the problem that it just doesn't exist?
http://www.hcra.harvard.edu/cellphones.html
How can you say this knowing that accidents caused by cell phones aren't collected uniformly or accurately?
While it's good that the study has been peer reviewed and not funded by an obviously biased source, it's clearly not a very reliable survey, given the wide disparity in the range of findings. Just one example:
"The estimate of fatalities ranges between 800 and 8,000, and the estimate of injuries is between 100,000 and 1 million."
The difference between the low end and the high end of the estimated ranges varies by a factor of ten times; the range between the mean and the low and high is more than three times. That's not exactly what you could call "precise."
Given the huge range, it would seem from this result that the sample size of accidents studied was very low, and the confidence interval used may have been well below 90%. This one is sounding more like guesswork than it is hard science.
Precisely! That is why we should ban the use completely. No hands free or hand held. We know that people driving and talking on the phone are distracted. To what extent is hard to determine. It is easier and more fair to those in that wide variation of fatalities to eliminate the distraction completely. If you want to eliminate the other distractions so often mentioned, get a hold of your state legislators. It is obvious to me that no matter how much evidence or actual cases of cell phone usage killing people is presented. Some will not accept it as worthy of a law. If 800 fatalities and 100,000 injuries caused by cell phone users is not enough for you to decide that it is a problem, how many do you want to see dead before you accept it as a problem?
I was talking to my neighbor yesterday. He is a field engineer for Qualcomm. He uses his cell phone all the time. He is amazed at how many "lame brained idiots" cannot talk and pay attention to their driving. He does not see any other choice but to pass laws against them.
Uh, I already did that for you. I provided a link that showed you that according to law enforcement investigations in several US states, the rate of accidents that had phones as a "contributory factor" was well below 1.0%.
Margins of error are a function of the "confidence interval" that is accepted (in other words, the degree of accuracy demanded by the surveyer), and the size of the sample. It's pretty clear that the Harvard study above had a very small sample, because the size of the range between the low and high ends are apart by a factor of ten, and may have had a low confidence interval, which helps the surveyer to get away with using a small sample size. And it is likely that the survey included a lot of assumptions that weren't supported by hard data, so he tested his model based upon certain inputs that he couldn't verify or support (read: he did a lot of guessing, albeit methodically.)
So you did. Then the LA Times investigates the CHP and finds they did not do a very thorough job and it was in fact a contributory factor in what 11% of the fatalities. Which can be attributed to laziness on the part of the CHP officer. Easier to finish the report than investigate an eye witness account of the accident. I can tell you from my own experience that CHP do not want eye witness accounts on accidents. I saw a wheel barrow fall off of a truck and smash through the window of a mini-van. I followed the truck and got the license number circled back onto the freeway and gave it to the CHP that were there by that time. His response was unless I could positively ID the driver they were not interested. I gave the number to the driver of the van that was miraculously only slightly injured. How many eye witness accounts of cell phone related accidents get swept under the table?
Face the facts. You do not want to believe your own eyes. You cannot tell me you have not witnessed stupid driving behavior by someone talking on the cell phone. If you have not you must put less miles a year than I do. Which is about 6k miles.
Nobody is claiming that we haven't seen bad behavior by people using phones. But that isn't the issue.
The essential question is: How would these same people drive if they didn't have phones? Would their driving improve, or would they be about the same?
Given the accident rates, it's pretty easy to guess that the phones don't matter much, if at all, in part because the trends in accident rates aren't changing.
This goes back to Fintail's question: If the phones are so incredibly dangerous, as you keep claiming, then why aren't we seeing this trendline changing?
We should be seeing bodies stacked up like cordwood if what you are saying is true, but we aren't. You need to demonstrate causation, but you haven't done it.
If you are in an area where you can safely make or receive a call, and it is legal to do so in your state, then go for it. Is it as safe as driving without such a distraction, well of course not -- too obvious to even comment on. Think about it. It is really safe using that micro-phone to call or talk while driving? If you are not within mile of a car, or driving off the side of a mountain is not a problem - then again, go for it.
Other things mentioned here can be more dangerous, but so what -- not the question at hand.
-Loren
That's the whole point -- it's debatable that there are more wrecks at all. If you look at NHTSA data about accidents, fatalities, etc., nothing seems to be changing because of the phones. Things are generally slowly improving, phones or not.
Shouldn't we be shooting for better numbers?
That's the question being asked -- will the numbers get better? You seem to be making the presumption that if you take away the phones that suddenly, all of these folks will be paying full attention, driving with both hands on the wheel, and acting like model citizens, but there's no proof that they will.
Again, if the phones are so bad, then why don't we see the accident and fatality rates skyrocketing? If the phones are as bad as you say, then we should be seeing some radical changes in the statistics, but this just isn't happening.
I guess it could be worse. A navigation system may ask you to turn right one quarter mile,while heading South on Hwy1 at Ragged Point.
But it keeps life interesting.
-Loren
http://www.wsp.wa.gov/traveler/agdrvng.htm
Best thing to do is just call it in as a suspected drunk. They can at least waste someone's time then.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just teach people lane discipline, and have the staters stick to camping out under overpasses cherry-picking the inattentive?
This is perhaps the most high-profile talkin' on the cell phone story I've read about since the new law went into effect. :surprise:
Rocky
Sure people do stupid things, like putting on make-up, reading the paper, etc. But cell phone users have a driving tempo all to themselves and it's scary. 99% of the time it's evident when a person is engrossed in the conversation and not driving safely. The scarier part is, I don't believe most people understand how their driving behavior changes.
So yes, I'm all for singling out cell phone users, and the state I live in already has a law on the books.
That's a strawman argument, being that nobody is arguing that the phones improve driving skills.
Cupholders don't make driving safer, either, but we don't see anybody trying to ban them. We're going to end up with single-seat cars with 50-mph bumpers and 5-mph speed governors if we take your logic to its logical conclusion.
Perhaps we should create an analogy beyond driving: Let's take a guy whom we will call "Homer." Homer is a bit overweight -- OK, he's a lot overweight -- and we'd like to deal with his weight problem.
We conduct a study, and determine that Homer gets 15% of his calories from beer and donuts. In light of these horrific findings, we issue a life-saving edict: Homer will no longer be permitted to drink beer or eat donuts.
Five years later, and we find that even though he obeyed our rules -- no more beer and donuts for him -- Homer hasn't lost any weight at all. (In fact, he's even bigger than before.) We scratch our hands and commission another study, as we have no clue why nothing happened to improve Homer's weight problem.
You don't need to be a dietician to figure out what happened -- Homer replaced the beer and donuts in his diet with other things, perhaps soda pop and cupcakes, for example. So while he followed our dietary rules, nothing happened to improve his overall weight problem, because we never addressed the real causes of his obesity.
Same thing with the phones. We know from overall statistics that the accident and fatality rates seem unaffected by the phones. We see from studies that the effect of the phones on individual drivers is all over the board, and unpredictable. If you can't figure out why the latter is inconsistent, then you'll never address the real causes.
So your law is likely to have the Homer Effect -- sounds great, but ultimately does nothing. As the distraction prone find new things to distract them, you'll add new things to your blameworthy list without ever figuring out that it was always about the driver being the problem and not the phone, just as it always about Homer and not the beer.
You don't consider that a strawman argument?
No one has pushed to get rid of anything other than the proven weapon. The CELL PHONE. It has in fact caused many accidents. It has caused many that it did not get blamed for. Eating too many donuts is not a legitimate argument.
Several states have laws banning the use of cell phones in one form or another. I have not heard of a one of those states wanting to do away with cupholders and passenger seating. Please come up with a better argument.
You keep referring to the accident rates which came down for a couple years. I have to assume that all the improvements in safety had nothing to do with that.
PS
Who is Homer?
You haven't proven anything. Why isn't the accident rate skyrocketing if the phones are such a problem?
Several states have laws banning the use of cell phones in one form or another.
If what you said is true, then their death and accident rates should be falling at a much faster rate than the nation as a whole. Are they?
Again our case has been proven to the satisfaction of the CA Legislature and the Governor. No more proof needed.
It isn't, which is why your argument doesn't work. (The NHTSA data makes this clear.)
Again, if your position is correct, and phones are the horrible killer that you claim that they are, we should be seeing some massive declines in the accident and death rate in states with such phone bans. Yet this hasn't happened. Why not?
The best and most recent data available does not provide any support for the effectiveness of these laws. That's somewhat irrelevant. Since when does a law have to be effective in order to justify its existence? My personal feeling is that if you must enact new legislation it should be for a trial period. The objective must be clearly defined and if not met in some pre-determined time frame then the law would automatically expire. That will never happen because even if a law doesn't accomplish its objective it provides people with a false sense of control. They will state that while a condition didn't improve it would have gotten worse without the law. To conclude otherwise would be an admission that laws aren't effective at solving problems and that notion would be far too disconcerting for most people. Kind of like taking away a child's security blanket.
You hit the nail on the head with this comment: "It doesn't necessarily have to be enforced other than when the actions of the simplest 10 % results in a death."
Based on this standard, as applied to cell phones, no action is necessary, because no credible proof has been advanced showing that their use has led to more accidents and fatalities.