Re: It's a myth that cellphone use caused the accident rate to rise in the USA

bad��sector wrote on Sat, 25 May 2024 21:43:23 -0400 :

In order to have any meaningful correlation between cell phones in cars
and their effect on accidents one would have to know how many of those
cell phones were in use while driving and also the accident rate in
those cars as compared to the others. Without this in the case of
cell-phone correlation the supplied study provides just irrelevant
statistical noise.

You bring up a point that we discussed in gory detail in the past, which is
that nobody knows much about the actual usage rate of cellphones. We all
know people use them; but we have no reliable data on how much they're
used.

I covered this in gory detail where the NHTSA reports every May of every
year (as I recall) on cellphone *usage* rates; but - get this - they
calculate that at red lights. Yes. Red lights. They hvae a person sitting
on the side peering into vehicles to note how many people are using them.

Clearly this is a flawed statistic - but I do agree with you it would be
one of the most important statistics for this dicussion - which we don't
have.

Again, this was covered in gory detail in the past, the point being that
the most *reliable* statistic we have is the accident rate (which is number
of accidents normalized by the number of miles driven).

The rest was an hypothesis to potentially explain that unexpected fact.

 
So we went from scientific method and statistical data to hypothetical
potentials. OK, I didn't lock in on that one, my bad :-)

Of course. As I said to micky, the fact is the fact is the fact.
The fact is the accident rate did not go up. It went down.
But it was always going down, so the trend was unchanged.

That's not *my* fact.
That's *the* fact.

Now the question is WHY.
Hell. I don't know why.

Like every other moron out there, I would have thought the accident rate
would have skyrocketed and then leveled off after saturation.

But what makes me different from every other moron out there is I looked
for the data - and that's when I found out that the accident rate trend is
unchanged.

So now we're stuck with explaining why.

All I have to explain why are my hypotheses.
You can disagree with them all you want.

That's the nature of an hypothesis.
Even Albert Einstein's theory of gravitation is only a theory.

Do you know that gravity isn't even a force?
You can ask me why, and I will tell you why, but that doesn't make my
hypothesis correct.

BTW, how many accident participants will voluntarily
offer up the fact that they'd been on the phone just before?

 
Guess what. The US census bureau statistics do NOT rely on that.
So it's a non sequitur what anyone "says" about the cause of the accident.

 
The cause of the accident is not likely to be recorded as having been
cell-phone use unless someone fesses up to it.
Accident investigation
does not on one hand include automatic mandatory x-checking with the
cell service providers and in many jurisdictions such would not even be
permitted on the other. I've done accident investigation in three areas
of activity and am of the opinion that quite a few reports are
misleading and not only accidentaly so ..for any number of reasons.

We covered this also in gory detail. Apparently there's now a checkbox on
many accident forms whether there was a cellphone in the vehicle at the
time of the accident.

Guess what? We covered that this box is checked almost 100% of the time.
Which skews the statistics like you can't believe.

Unfortunately, it's a statistic that will never be good simply because
there is no good way to collect it. That's too bad. But that's just the
facts.

The actual accidents are reportable in all fifty states.

 
Sidebar: is this comp.mobile.android or comp.mobile.android.us?

Well, we covered that in gory detail also.

In Australia, they statistics are good enough to show the same trends as
the USA but paradoxically, when we looked in the UK, the trends were
different.

There's a reason I only discuss the USA and that's the reason.
The statistics are phenomenally accurate for the USA.

I can't vouch for either Australia or the UK though.
So I only talk about the facts that I'm very confident of.

Make sense?

Nonetheless, you have a good point, so here are some searches:
 <https://www.google.com/search?q=accident+rate+australia+year+over+year>
 <https://www.google.com/search?q=accident+rate+uk+year+over+year>

Right, so
much for statistics which according to one prof. "is the science whereby
one can prove anything, or its exact opposite".

 
Nobody but you said that anyone said anything after the
accident. They could have had the accident for any number of reasons.

 
I never said that anyone said anything. What I thought to have alluded
to rather unequivocally was that IF someone had used a phone and knew
that that use had lead up to the accident then that person would not
likely volunteer that information.

Agree. I'll always agree with any logically sensible assessment of facts.

This may soon become unnecessary
anyway with the onset of AI helping cops catch offenders given that it
has the speed to analyse cell traffic around and entire block for
instance and alert the cop waiting at the intersection "green Honda
arriving from South leg in 45 seconds was on line while in motion for
the last ten and a half minutes". Once the pull-over happens all the
data is already printed on the ticket.

This is perhaps the future... especially since police already do geofencing
dragnets when there is a crime, so why not when there is an accident.

And although this thread is already way off-topic, one more tidbit:
accident prevention depends on defensive legislation AND defensive
driving.

Actually, we covered that also. Turns out all the safety laws are for
naught. Sadly so. The only effect of safety laws is a second-order effect
on length of hospital stay. (Remember, I alluded to this when I said to
someone that the second-order effects will knock your socks off).

But I don't want to go there because people haven't even understood the
first-order effects yet - so it's premature to move to the effect (or lack
of effect) of safety laws on injuries (we even covered how much money they
make - which is billions per year - on tickets for safety law violations).

It is not at all necessary for a lawmaker to KNOW that a
scientific correlation exsist between cell use and accidents, it is more
important to act with prejudice and watch for what, cell-phones
included, MIGHT cause an accident. The way to legislate is the way that
I have driven over a million clicks with no accident, if anyone wants to
argue with that, go for it.

Except, sadly, that the laws have no first order effects. We can dig that
one up, but it's too deep for this group when people can't even read an
excel spreadsheet by one of the most reliable government agencies around.

The main effect of safety laws in this realm is on revenue generation.
We covered this in gory detail already. Look it up.