Say Anything Blog

I belong to the Triple-A and recommend it.  If you ever have a breakdown while you’re on the road they can be a godsend.  I had a car problem on the road on a weekend no less last year.  They certainly made a bad day less bad (and found me an honest mechanic in a strange town.)

Part of your membership is a travel magazine.  I was recently paging through this magazine.  I found an article that claimed that cell phones made you four times more likely to be in an accident.

How can this be?  Wasn’t there a time that people didn’t have cell phones?  Didn’t cell phone usage skyrocket from the period 1994 to 2007? 

So what happened to the traffic fatalities rate over this time.  Well from a perspective of miles travels it dropped drastically.  In 1994 there were 1.73 fatalities for every hundred million miles traveled.  In 2007 that rate had dropped to 1.36. 

Clearly cell phone usage isn’t the reason for the drop.  However if cell phones made you 4 times more likely to be in an accident that number should have increased significantly rather than dropped.

I recently say a Mythbusters episode that covered this.  And under the conditions that they used it did show that drivers talking on a cell phone (in a certain way) had their ability to drive (in a certain way) greatly diminished.

But the accident rates didn’t go up.  So what’s going on.

Well in the Mythbusters episode the drivers had to negotiate a very challenging unfamiliar course while they were engaged in mental exercises to show that they were engaged in their cell phone conversation.  I think that kind of testing is atypical from what a cell phone driver would really do.

First of all a cell phone driver is not usually deeply engaged in their conversation.  They aren’t trying to solve a riddle nor are they trying to memorize a string of words.  I would think your brain is much more able to gab without seriously distracting you then if you were doing those mental gymnastics.

Secondly the drivers were expected to continue on their course which was very challenging.  They weren’t driving down routine roads that are traveled every day.  If a driver in the real world gets challenged by events they don’t continue driving the difficult course at a prescribed speed.  No, they stop or slow down which is something that is pretty much reflexive in an experienced driver.

A better test would be to have an unexpected event happen and allow the driver the option of slowing, stopping or swerving depending on the need.  I think that would better judge the accident rate.  Unfortunately such a test is probably impossible to arrange since the test subjects would know that something was going to happen. 

I imagine that the test that the AAA magazine was referring to was conducted along the same sort of lines that the Mythbusters did.  Cute experiments are interesting, but I think it’s important to validate them with real world experience.