Why do people claim cellphone use increased the USA accident rate?

HINT: that's *your* strawman argument. You still haven't fully evidenced your actual argument in a single post. As per usual you scattergun your information across multiple making it very difficult to follow your thought process.

Your hypothesis is that mobile/smartphone adoption by the general population has had no effect on the US car accident rate. That's your null hypothesis. In order to reject the null - under the NHST - and accept the alternative (i.e. mobiles to affect the accident rate) you need to find data that compares driving with a mobile vs driving without a mobile

Does that data exist? And where?

That's not stronger. Only different as this is a temporal assessment of change not a binary one that your overall premise expects.

This test requires different data, but also requires that other potentially confounding factors are controlled.

Does this data exist? And where?

Please answer directly to this post so we can all the information consistently in one place.

Frequent logical gap to an unsupported conclusion.

USA has world-high rates of autism in children. USA also had very high rates of childhood vaccination. Some people infer a link but such may or may not actually be causal. This is as yet unknown; maybe, but maybe not.

Telephones _may_ cause driver incompetence when attention becomes critical and inattention fatal. This _may_ be largely offset by population level better driving habits and _perhaps_ by wider adoption of safety equipment (air bags and such). There _may_ well be a significant difference between use of audio (telephone or radio) and direct visual engagement (games, movies, p*rn, texting, video telephone calls) with a screen (telephone or car console).

Or none of that might be significant. I don't know and you don't either.

It absolutely is known. It has been tested and retested many times. There is no evidence that any vaccine causes autism in children.

Sure it does. It increments the USA accident rate by 1.

Yes. You put evidence of individual events together and you have statistics and then when you analyze statistics you have data.

What you should be looking at is this: of the number of people charged in accidents, what has been the progression of the rate of distracted driving charges related to phones.

Perhaps it would have lowered faster were it not for people using their cellphones while driving.

And whatever happened to the campaigns against smoking in bed? Used to be we had a lot of deaths from people smoking in bed.

--scott

Logic tells me that if the young twit coming up behind me had not been texting the accident I mentioned would likely have never happened.

I have no doubt that many other people have such "anecdotes" where a collision was caused by some moron using their phone instead of paying attention to the road.

Depending on the car and the brand of fuel, premium gasoline may be of some benefit. For example, Shell oil company conducted tests showing that Super Shell with Platformate delivered more miles per gallon. Premium gasolines may also have more and better detergents and, depending on the engine and its control system, you may also have more power. (I worked for over a decade in the R&D department of a major oil company.)

So it is your claim that people using cell phones while driving have not caused accidents which otherwise would not have occurred. "Anecdotal" evidence at the very least suggests that is not the case.

I don't claim to know what other people want. I have no interest in smart phones or their so-called "apps", and have no plans to ever own one. In fact my much simpler phone is off most of the time unless there is a need to use it. I'm not on board with the modern idea of being reachable 24/7 under virtually all circumstances. Call, leave a message, I'll get back to you when I can.

As far as entertainment, my cars have AM/FM radio and tape decks. No bluetooth. No wifi. No connectivity. That works for me.

That's what I do other than mounting/balancing tires. I have yet to own a car made in the 21st century.

I still have cars from the 1960s and early 1970s, though not for daily use. They are used little enough that a set of points and plugs lasts for quite a few years so I've resisted the temptation to convert to electronic ignition. I do still keep my dwell meter, plug gapper, and timing light handy.

I happen to agree with you on that, but just as the telephones-in-autos example, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Because a cellphone (at least the smart variety) has a predominantly visual interface. They cannot be operated by touch alone. They are a distraction much worse than customarily allowed (radios, or conversation in the cab, for example).

Eyes cannot be kept on the road when a smartphone is in use.

Thus, they cannot plausibly reduce crash risk. It must be admitted, however, that they do speed up first responder's arrival.

bob prohaska

No, I am an agnostic/atheist.

That's why I am an agnostic/atheist.

I don't drive.

Um what? I just claimed that there would be NO spike.

Except with vaccines there isn't any absence of evidence.

I'm tired, not interested in arguing this again. So I asked ChatGPT to argue it for me. If you do not agree with what he says, take it with him :-P

Q: Someone on internet is wrong (this is a joke ;-) )

He claims there is no proof that driving while using a phone is not dangerous, that no data supports the prohibition of using a phone while driving.

Can you tell me what to tell him? :-)

A: Oh, this is a beautiful opportunity for a **“citation required”** response. 😄

The key distinction is that there are really **two claims**:

1. **“Using a phone while driving is dangerous.”** There is substantial evidence for this.
2. **“Phone-use prohibitions demonstrably reduce crashes.”** The evidence for the _effect of the laws themselves_ is more mixed. That second claim should not be overstated.

For the first claim, the evidence is pretty hard to miss:

- A large naturalistic-driving study using data from **3,500 drivers and 35 million miles of driving** found that handheld cellphone use was associated with about **3.6× the crash risk** of ordinary driving. Talking on a handheld phone was associated with about **2.2× the risk**, while texting was about **6.1×**. NHTSA

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- Another analysis of the same broad naturalistic-driving dataset found handheld-phone use significantly associated with crash involvement; visual-manual tasks such as texting had an even stronger association. NHTSA

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- The **WHO** currently states that drivers using mobile phones are approximately **four times more likely to be involved in a crash**, and notes slower reaction times and poorer lane/following-distance control. It also says hands-free phones are not much safer. World Health Organization

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- A systematic review/meta-analysis of naturalistic-driving studies found that phone tasks requiring drivers to look away from the road—dialling, locating the phone, texting, etc.—increase the risk of safety-critical events. PubMed

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And there's an especially amusing response to the **“there's no data”** part: the U.S. road-safety agency NHTSA literally publishes the underlying crash-risk estimates and cites the studies behind them. 😄 NHTSA+1

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### The scientifically fair comeback

You could tell him:

And if you want the **slightly more internet-y version**:

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One important caveat, though: **don't let him successfully change the subject from “is phone use dangerous?” to “do phone bans reduce crashes?”** Those are different empirical questions. A systematic review of 32 studies found the evidence for _penalties/laws_ was weaker and somewhat inconsistent, although it pointed toward reductions in phone use and potentially fatalities from some types of bans. PubMed

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So, annoyingly for both sides of an internet argument, the intellectually honest position is: **the danger is very well supported; the effectiveness of any particular prohibition is a separate and more complicated empirical question.** 😄

Carlos, this may be the beginning of all-AI arguments on usenet. Probably not a good thing :-(

-- Cheers, Bev "History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." -- letter from Thomas Jefferson to Baron vonHumboldt, 1813

As with police radio and truckers on CB for decades, audio seems to be benign as compared to a video or text device. Yet legislatures make no distinction and aggregated data (as referenced by OP) lumps all those together. Some large proportion of people believe both that there is a childhood vaccine and autism link ( I am not one) and that telephones are a crash risk while ignoring console and telephone video and text as unique interfaces disparate from audio.

Existing evidence has failed to sway a great many people in both areas.

Hi Chris,

I certainly know the answer to the question that I posed in this thread. I knew it a decade ago.

Why? Because I can think. I can do research. I can look up the data.

So I knew cellphones had zero measurable effect on accident rate.

So why did I make the thread, again, after ten more years of data? I am making a very clear point that nobody who responded knows it.

The hypothesis of most people is premium gasoline gives their Honda Civic more power, just because of the propaganda they parrot that they're fed.

Likewise, people parrot the incorrect information that astronauts are 'weightless' in space, right, or, that gravity is a force, right?

Why? I know why.

People don't think. If it "sounds" plausible, they believe it.

Most people got C's or maybe B's in school because they couldn't think. Most people simply do not own the mental capacity to think things through.

So most people believe all the bullshit that a politician or marketing spiel tells them to believe - and they don't even *think* to question it.

That's one reason I love the Mythbusters TV series, as they tested them. Who knew, for example, that a lit cigarette doesn't light a puddle of gas.

That's the problem here.

Most people are claiming that, by Golly, since cellphone use rocketed up during only a handful of years, accidents *must* have followed the trend.

And yet, they didn't.

HINT: I'll bring this up, again, a decade from now, and guess what... Nobody will have learned a damn thing. That's rather sad.

Gravity is a indeed a force:

Gravity Electromagnetism Weak Interaction (or Weak Nuclear Force) Strong Interaction (or Strong Nuclear Force)

Hi Scott,

You're wrong, but I'll chalk it up to your attempt at a joke, which is fine, but let's be clear, just as weather isn't climate, numbers of accidents has to be divided by miles driven to obtain the accident rate.

I get it you're desperate to fabricate any excuze for why your belief system isn't based on facts, but if you want to make a case about police prosecution, please make your compelling argument using vetted facts.

Like I did by using the US government data which has been collected since about the 1920's & hence has been tested for almost a century for accuracy.

There are likely many reasons why the US accident rate has been trending downward before, during and after the introduction of cell phone tech.

But what's clear in the excellent USA well-vetted data that the introduction of the cell phone had no measurable effect on accident rate.

You have to START with that fact, before forming any hypothetical rebuttal.

I have no idea. What are the statistics that you show to make the point?

Hi Roger,

What I'm trying to impart to people on these ngs is that they fell for the propaganda, which turned out to be bullshit lies wrapped in anecdotes.

Just as people believe gravity is a force, we've known since 1916 it's not.

It took a while for Einstein to prove it, which is kind of what's happening here because people can't believe the data that there is no measurable change in accident rate in the USA before, during or after cellphones were introduc3ed, let alone some kind of mysterious skyrocketing that's "hidden" (by whom? Aliens?) in exact timing and skyrocketing introduction rates.

Yet, people always fall on their anecdotes, such as "A friend of my mother's sister saw this accident", and form their entire belief system based on that one anecdote (simply because it "sounded plausible" to them).

Using the example of Scott about cigarettes in bed, I can claim equally as well that I knew a guy smoking cigarettes and his wife never divorced him.

Therefore, using the same anecdotal evidence you & Scott are attempting to apply, this proves (in your minds) that smoking in bed lowers the divorce rate. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But where's the data I will ask.

Regarding home maintenance, I'm sure a lot (if not most?) of the folks on some of the automotive newsgroups do all their own work, which, I must add, saves them a ton of money, although, I'm in my 80's now, and it's getting harder and harder to be on the ground (I bring along cushions & knee pads).

As for none of my current cars are older than 1996, so all of them have the 'new fangled' pointless ignition, which,

Given dwell angle was something we set because it directly affected coil saturation & ignition timing, "electronic ignition", wiped out my need for testing it. As I recall, my Sears Craftsman chromed timing light lasted longer but I don't even know if my late 1990s vehicles have timing notches on the harmonic balancer, but worse, there's no distributor to twist.

Times changed in the past 86 years, that's fer' sure!

Hi Bob,

You're on to something IMPORTANT with that astute observation. But first we have to start with the facts, and not the religion.

Take Einstein informing the world in 1916 that time is not invariant. It took a long time for people to believe in Minkowski 4D spacetime, right?

It sounds plausible, to people that time must be the same for everyone. And yet, it's not.

It sounds plausible, to people, that light is either a wave or a particle. And yet, it's both.

Any scientist knows that what sounds plausible to others, may not be fact.

So, sure, it sounds plausible that cellphones are an *added* distraction. BTW, I don't disagree with that and I don't think anyone disagrees with it.

So then why didn't the accident rate skyrocket between the time the cellphone didn't exist, to the time that it became ubiquitous in vehicles?

HINT: I know the answer, but I can't explain it to you until you start to think about what could be the reason there was no increase in accident rate, when, clearly, cellphones are an added distraction by all counts.

Physics rests on the four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong & weak atomic forces. Einstein's General Theory (1916) affirms that, and the 1919 eclipse provided dispositive proof.

As a scientist, you know this. So, whatever your point above was, it makes no sense within the context of physics.