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."

Re:WHere is the paper

[mspohr]

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)

Re:Another amazing fact

[ben_white]

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... [iihs.org]

--
cheers - ben

Its all bs

[Lawrence_Bird]

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?

Driving with children isn’t just slightly more dangerous; it’s a full 12 times more dangerous, according to the study. When researchers installed cameras in the cars of 12 families over a three-week period, they found talking on the phone only accounted for one percent of distractions. Distractions from children, meanwhile, accounted for 12 percent of all distractions. Over the course of an average 16-minute trip, parents that had kids present spent three minutes and 22 seconds with their eyes not on the road.

Last I checked driving fatalities have been on a downward slope forever. Please stop the safety nanny crowd before it is too late.

Re:Another amazing fact

[Enigma2175]

According to page 43 of this study [ornl.gov], 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 [umich.edu]). 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?