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

That's close. People handle distractions all the time. They've been handling thousands of distractions since the 1920s. Some better'n others.

What's one more distraction? Try having a screaming kid in the car to learn how to handle them better.

Or, a cute girl is walking down the street just as you're supposed to make a turn or watch out for the bicyclist on the side of the road crossing it.

The cell phone actually *lowered* the accidents in some ways, most likely though, so that has to be accounted for in addition to causing accidents.

For example, people get advanced notice of the next turn, traffic backups, which lane to be in, what lane to turn into, etc., so they reduced accidents at the same time they may have contributed to accidents.

People who believe only in propaganda don't take those advantageous factors into account when they claim that cellphones in cars is only dangerous.

Liar.

Liar.

You're not a scientist.

I don't mind the Apple religious zealots trying to attack all facts they don't know (which is all facts) with insults, but it's insulting that Your Name can't even attempt to write an insult without misspelling the words.

The fact remains that the USA data clearly shows no change in the accident rate slowly downward trend during the meteoric rise in cellphone ownership.

Instead of simply denying those facts, why not try to understand why? 1. Certainly we all have heard the anecdotal horror stories 2. And clearly we've all been exposed to what the legal firms claim 3. Nobody can ignore the wild screaming of the politicians either, right?

So, despite all that, why didn't the accident rate change then? A. Certainly, adding a cellphone adds another distraction to driving B. And certainly, distractions should be contributing to accidents, right? C. So why didn't a huge use of cellphones change the accident rate then?

I proposed an hypothesis why a decade ago, and that still stands true now.

The problem with making "morality" judgments for other people is it's like the Salem Witch Trials in that your decree upon others is based on no data.

1. All of us would "intuit" that cellphones would increase accident rates.
2. Yet, some of us (i.e., me!) checked the data and found it just isn't so.
3. Which means we should figure out WHY they had no effect on the rate.

Claiming people shouldn't use cell phones is not what smart people do. It's like claiming that stepping on a rusty nail is what causes tetanus. HINT: The rust has nothing to do with it.

People believe bullshit all the time. Very few people are intelligent enough to check if the BS is real or not.

Take the aforementioned example of high-octane fuel. People who are not intelligent believe it gives more power to their Honda. HINT: It can't.

Take the prior case of people believing floating astronauts are weightless. HINT: They're not.

The fact remains that a. Cellphones are an added distraction, for sure, but b. Cellphones had absolutely no effect on the accident rate

Now the question is why. HINT: I provided an hypothesis a decade ago, which still stands today.

...

It is not a fact, only your opinion.

The only way to potentially test such a theory would be to confiscate EVERY driver's cellphone and force them to retain their same car for a year to see what the accident numbers are. Even then, it wouldn't be

Not really. Quite a simple experiment, really. Take two relatively large groups of people with similar ranges of driving requirements and experience. One group has no access to mobile phones and the other does. Then test their accident and/or near-miss rate after say 1000 miles and/or a month.

Repeat it two or three times in a year to cover different seasons.

Nothing is 100% accurate when comes to statistical studies.

Nope. This thread is purely you denying, deflecting and attacking. As per usual.

It is also a perfect example of running correlations on unrelated data and jumping to wrong conclusions. There's a very clear mantra is statistics: "absence of proof is not proof of absence".

No. You checked the data and drew an unsupportable conclusion.

Since you cannot know what the accident rate would have been absent the added distractions of smartphones.