I think you mean from University of North Carolina-- I live in Chapel Hill, and as far as I know, it's just UNC here. (;

If it was just number of deaths, I'd say it's partially because doctors and emergency workers have gotten better at fixing us when we break. And there are features like OnStar, which will call for emergency care if you're not able to, making it more likely the paramedics will be able to patch you up.

Smarter cars, with safety features like traction control? Perhaps smarter ways to control traffic? I've noticed many intersections in my area have been upgraded in recent years to include arrows for the left turn lane and such. And traffic cameras better regulate the flow of traffic.

Also--this probably doesn't figure into these statistics, which don't go beyond 2008--more cars are equiped with BlueTooth. Which means that when my cell phone rings, instead of having to ignore it, or fumble through my purse to answer it, the call is forwarded to my car's speaker system. To "pick up" the phone in my car, I simply push a button on the steering wheel, the radio mutes, and I'm able to talk to the person completely hands free. I can call out in a similar manner.

Full disclosure, as required by my company: I do work for GM. Doesn't make the bluetooth in my car any less awesome or convenient. It was truly a feature I never knew I needed before I had it. ;)

Maybe safe driving campaigns in general have swamped the negative effect of cell phone use. I'm thinking anti-drink driving, better road signage, and better built roads (this article from Slate has great info about improving roads signs http://www.slate.com/id/2245644/) lower speed limits (and the enforcement of them), even seatbelts. I know you said property damage claims are down, too, but perhaps just the wearing of a seatbelt encourages a safer driving mentality, instead of a risk-taking one.

It is possible that we are eliminating other risks. For example, California is extremely restrictive in its laws regarding minor drivers and drivers in their early majority for the first 3 years they hold a license. Other examples: air bags, making light trucks meet passenger car safety standards, the change in attitude towards drunk driving.

Accidents causing property damage only, per mile driven, have also declined.

Could it be that the usage of mobile phones is indeed causing accidents, but that other factors (the steady reduction in drunk-driving, say) overwhelm this effect? This'd give a small year-on-year change versus a large year-on-year drop, and as a result, the net change continues downwards despite one or more factors pushing it up.

(The part I find intriguing is the almost constant number of deaths since the early 1990s, despite dramatic changes in the number of passenger-miles driven)

Media hype.

Maybe having so many cell phones makes it easier to call for ambulances, causing medical care to arrive more quickly and saving more lives that way?

Is it possible that there are other causes of traffic fatality that have gone down? Haven't there been increasing penalties for drinking and driving in that timeframe? And campaigns for seatbelt-wearing?

It's also possible that mobile phone users are more likely to get into accidents, but those accidents are not as likely to be fatal?

It seems that the data is pretty insufficient here to draw conclusions about anyone's claims.

“Where is the upward trend in traffic deaths and accidents?”

The graph is a little misleading and perhaps not even necessary. To identify a trend, we would need the percentage of all accidents and/or accident fatalities caused by cell phone use while driving over time. The rate of traffic fatalities per mile traveled has decreased and total traffic fatalities have remained constant or decreased slightly, yet the percentage of those fatalities caused by cell phone use could, in theory, increase. It seems like additional data are required.

So without that data I’m inclined to agree with the third point. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “suggests this since it “estimates that driver distraction from all sources contributes to 25 percent of all police-reported traffic crashes”. And later, “In a controlled study, comparing eating and operating a voice-activated cell phone to continuously operating a CD player, it was found that the CD player operation was more distracting than the other activities. In a test track study conducted by NHTSA, the results showed that manual dialing was about as distracting as grooming/eating, but less distracting than reading or changing CDs. It is also important to keep in mind that some activities are carried out more frequently and for longer periods of time and may result in greater risk.”
(From: NHTSA Policy and FAQs on Cellular Phone Use While Driving, October 2009)

From personal experience I know that I am much less likely to be aggressive and attempt risky maneuvers like weaving in and out of traffic if I am on the phone. This is partly because I know that being on the phone reduces my ability to focus, but mostly I drive less aggressively because I feel like I am multitasking and so waiting a few more minutes in traffic is acceptable because I am getting something else done too.

I find this to be somewhat the case with other drivers too. The person on the phone might try to merge without looking, or drift in the lane, but they are unlikely to be the person zipping ahead and cutting in.

Cars are much, much safer than they were even 10 years ago.

A couple of things I notice, when looking at this:

1. The big drops in fatalities are in non-drivers (although there are still, I think, declines in per-mile fatalities among drivers). These might be explained by a decrease in the number of passengers, pedestrians, and bicyclists -- in other words, driving could be getting safer because each driver is responsible for fewer lives. (I don't have data to back up my intuition that we're carpooling less, but I think we are.)

In other words, it could be that danger per mile traveled on roadways hasn't decreased nearly as much as danger per mile driven -- a greater percentage of the miles we travel on roadways now involve being the driver.

2. The number of miles driven has been increasing much faster than the number of drivers. Between 1994 and 2007, we saw a 10% increase in the number of miles driven per driver. Maybe as a result of all that extra driving, our drivers are simply becoming more skilled.

3. Related to #2, our population is aging (and I would imagine the people-with-cars population is aging faster than the people-without-cars population, because people with cars tend to be richer and less Hispanic). This means the number of young drivers, who are more accident-prone, is decreasing, and that more of the population has been driving for longer.

Not all of the growth in mobile devices is among drivers. Some if it is among non-driving youth and among public transit users. While it might be difficult to disambiguate the latter, it might be simpler to compare age subpopulations.

Whenever there is an accident, a police officer fills out an accident report form. One of the boxes on the form is generally something all the lines of "cause of accident." I'm pretty sure this data is collected on a national level. I'm 99.9% certain that at least insurance companies have access to this data.

It could be that "operator using cell-phone" has become the answer du jour.

I know people opposed to speed limits often use this argument. "Speed" is often listed as the cause of accident when no other cause can be found. After all, the box must be filled out.

Thanks, folks. Plenty to chew on. If cell phones are causing more accidents, maybe the limits and penalties are reasonable, even if the roads are getting safer for other reasons - though it seems to me simpler just to penalize distracted driving in general.

Maybe someone can get a good project out of reading through the legislative bills and debates, or op-eds, and see if they are generating the impression that things are getting more dangerous on the roads to justify no-cell-phone-driving laws. That's the feeling I got when I did this, but have no systematic information to back it up.

Thanks for the guest spot, CSI! <--contexts-soc-images

I've already done this research:
http://craigfriebolin.blogspot.com/2010/03/cell-phone-ban.html

The answer is ... Cell phones aren't a distraction that we can't handle. In other words; if there were NO DISTRACTIONS the roads would be 4 feet wide and we would follow 2 inches behind the guy infront of us

Maybe using the phone while driving is equally distracting as other activities, but it's a whole lot easier to police that than eating or changing the radio station. But I wonder too if it is a reminder that any distraction is dangerous while driving?
The Queensland government has a campaign at the moment about how driver distractions are dangerous. http://www.transport.qld.gov.au/Home/Safety/Road/Campaigns/Driver_distractions_campaignSo while it is illegal here to talk on the phone while driving, the govt is recognising that it's not just something special about mobile phones, it's any distraction.

I find that talking on the phone while driving. Here, in Spain, and I think that in most of Europe, it's been forbidden (not with hands free systems) for some years now. Maybe the fact that automatic gear shift cars are not so common has something to do with it. It's very difficult to change gears, hold the wheel and hold the phone at the same time with just two hands.

As to why deaths have decreased while the number of phones has increased, they are unrelated. The way to see if something (using the phone, drinking and driving, going too fast, etc.) affect the number of accidents is to see in how many of the total accidents that factor was involved.

Let's see it with another example. In Spain between the years 2003 and 2004 the per capita consumption of beer increased a little bit. In the same time, the number of deaths by car accident decreased from 5399 to 4741. So, are they related? The increase in beer consumption makes the number of deaths by car accident decrease? No.

It's the same with mobile phones.

Could I just make a couple of points as a person who works in the field of injury prevention--

1. Mobile communications devices are an identifiable risk factor in causing motor vehicle accidents. Good scientific studies, based on both experiment and analysis of real-world incidents, have supported this for over 40 years.

2. _Overall_, motor vehicles are safer today, both to their users and the population at large, than in the past.

3. This is in no small part to the application of the public health/epidemiology model to the problem of motor vehicle fatalities. Gather data on the problem, identify risk and protective factors, and develop interventions to reduce the former and enhance the latter.

4. See point 1.

Injury prevention people have rolled a lot of changes into the auto landscape in recent decades--from technological fixes like airbags and that goofy third brake light to legal changes like restrictions on teenage drivers and increased penalties for driving while intoxicated, to changes to the social landscape such as stigmatizing DWI and bringing the phrase "designated driver" into the lexicon. But we want to be very careful about a graph like this, that leads us to scratch our heads and wonder why we don't see more accidents "in the data" if cell phones are such a risk factor. They _are_ a huge risk factor, but you won't see that in a simple aggregate number because of all those groovy rumble strips and highly-reflective signs we're out there building.

Contributions to motor vehicle accidents/injuries/fatalities are a very complex system with an almost infinite number of variables, and unless you can narrow it down to isolate one variable, you're stuck with guessing at the forces at play, using whatever data you can gather from studying said variable in other contexts where it CAN be isolated.

I.e. we know drunk driving is extremely dangerous, but we didn't learn that JUST by looking at the accident record and counting how many featured an intoxicated driver---we observed in other contexts that alcohol impairs judgment and motor control and other things and applied that knowledge to the system of cars and drivers and roads.

We can do the same with cell phone use, texting, and any other potential distracting, by measuring and studying people's ability to multitask, and to switch tasks---I suspect that it might not be the divided attention during a traffic maneuver that is the big problem so much as the inability to instantly drop the cell phone conversation when something on the road suddenly demands one's FULL focus. We do fairly decently at multitasking, but we're not wired to drop a conversation midsentence or mid-word (let alone physically drop a cell phone) to focus on a complex maneuver (calculation of obstacles, physics and where/how the car can be moved) to avoid an accident. It's doable, of course, for most people, but it takes time, it slows one's reaction and response by perhaps a few seconds, and that is often all it takes.

Plus there's the potential for some secondary awareness aspects of driving (i.e. the presence/location of other cars around you) that might get dropped in order to focus on the conversation. If you have to swerve to avoid an obstacle ahead of you, and there's a car right to your left, you have to swerve right; if there's a car just behind you to the right, you have to swerve right while speeding up to avoid clipping them, or slow down quickly and swerve right after they've passed you, if there's time and space. If you are aware of both of these cars' positions before the need to react to the obstacle, that can be accomplished easier and quicker than if you have to take the time to notice the car to the right behind you, at which point you have less ability to get over safely ahead of that car.

Driving generally requires a fairly sedate awareness of everything going on around you, and is forgiving, generally, if you're not aware of EVERYTHING. Accident avoidance requires instant calculations and quick, decisive action, and those things you can generally trust to avoid you, are no longer by default staying out of your way.

So honestly, I'm thinking that banning cell phone use while driving is sort of like requiring seat belt use---it does little under normal circumstances, but once those circumstances change, it makes a huge difference. Seat belts come into play when accidents happen, and undistracted driving makes itself immensely helpful when the driver in front of you slams on the brakes, or when you hit an icy patch, or when somebody cuts you off to avoid slamming into the braking driver ahead of THEM, or when the guy who's stopping for the red so you can go on your green drops his coffee in his lap at just the wrong moment and abandons braking in favor of reacting to first-degree burns.

Texting, on the other hand, requires the use of your eyes, and as such I would think falls into the same category as drunk driving, in that it interferes with the level and types of attention required for safe driving in normal situations.

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