This is interesting. So why the focus on cell phones? Especially since it's facially an anti-industry move as well?

Number three needs its own graph.

This is a misleading correlation; you're comparing ownership of a device with assumed use in a car, but using total traffic fatalities as your Y. My understanding is the NTSB is recommending a ban because cell phone use factors into a high proportion of the total remaining annual traffic fatalities. Has this proportion gone up or down over the years relative to cell phone ownership? That would be a better comparison, but you might not like the results. 

Am I missing some kind of joke here? Of course the mere existence of mobile phones on the planet doesn't cause an increase in car accidents. Looking at this graph might even induce you to conclude the opposite.

Some deeper analysis into any changes of that "distracted" percentage may provide more insight, particularly a breakdown of causes of the distraction, if such information exists. Furthermore, looking at car accidents as a whole would be far be useful, because the decline in fatalities is surely largely due to improved car safety?

The texting crash "epidemic" is undoubtedly media hyperbole, but I don't think this graph does anything to debunk it.

I would be interested in knowing the effects of distracted driving on non-fatal accident rates.

This graph is very misleading. While overall driving fatalities have decreased, this is primarily due to a reduction in deaths of other persons in vehicles. Pedestrian deaths have risen substantially as driver deaths have gone down. This graph also does not take into account those who are injured but not killed due to auto crashes.

Auto crashes are still the number 1 cause of death for persons under 30. I personally have been hit and injured more than once by drivers on cell phones. Tests indicate cell phone use (texting) can be more impairing than drunk driving, and I dont imagine anyone advocating for relaxed drinking and driving laws.

This article is not only misleading but irresponsible.

I'd suspect that cars have merely gotten safer for their passengers. I can't imagine you're actually arguing that cell phones help stop car accident deaths, and your graph and statistics showing inverse relationships without acknowledging that there might be other factors accounting for lowered death rates are in fact irresponsible, as those less well versed in statistics and science are likely to interpret it as such.

This is a really lazy and hastily-drawn conclusion. Fatalities is a specious y-axis.

Are there really no other factors that could reduce fatalities as of the year 2007, such as the economic decline leading people to drive more fuel-efficient cars or take public transit, or the unemployed to simply stop driving at all, leading to a reduction in total fatalities without a significant change in the slope of the more important rate statistic of fatalities per miles driven? That makes a hell of a lot more sense than surmising that it's okay to use cell phones while driving simply because you see a trend graph that tells you what you want to hear.

Yeah, ummm, I'm not a statistician, nor an expert on driving with a cell phone, but the way this graphic is just 3 line graphs slapped on a x-y axis just SCREAMS that there's a spurious variable lurking somewhere. Probably several. It would make for a good segment on cable news show though...

i completely agree with this article. i browse the internet all the time while i'm driving to work and i haven't had any pr

The pedestrian fatalities went up in 2010.  Drivers are getting worse, but are less likely to kill themselves due to better safety engineering of their vehicles.

This is....very selective in presenting information.  There are a lot of things contributing to lower rates of traffic fatalities.  My father told me a story of when he was a teenager, and they'd regularly drink (underage) WHILE driving.  They'd get pulled over, the officer would take the alcohol, and they'd be sent on their way; nowadays drunk driving (PARTICULARLY for underage people) is much more severely punished.  More states have seat belt laws.  Cars are designed with the safety of the driver and passengers in mind, so that many newer cars can be completely totaled but the people in the car can walk away without a scratch.  We have better medical capabilities so people who are badly injured die less often.  Cell phones aren't the only changing factor in "whether car crashes happen and kill people."  The only way I can see them helping really is the fact that it's so much easier to call 911.  A car crash happened outside my house recently.  I whipped out my cell phone to call an ambulance within 30 seconds, and they'd already received 3 calls, presumably from the people in the less damaged car.  The one person who was injured was taken to the hospital immediately, but may have died had people not been able to react immediately.

i would go so far to say that little children along with any other passenger in the car causes more of a distraction than a cellphone, dont get me wrong, this is assuming that a person isnt keeping their eyes glued to their phone while it is in their lap

Shouldn't we be examining accidents rather than fatalities?

This is what we know:
1) Improvements in vehicle safety technology have been made, such that passengers are less likely to die at the moment of impact.
2) Improvements in medical technology have been made, such that accident victims are less likely to die on the way or at the hospital.
3) "Distraction" is a very difficult thing to determine after a crash has taken place, and it isn't widely used in routine crash reports (i.e., the police officer usually has a much better list of more provable things to list than distraction).

Ergo, to make the graph actually hold an iota of credibility:
1) You need to show total accidents, and not only fatalities.
2) You need to represent the types of accidents, and not only totals.
3) If you are going to include distraction, you must present the category in such a way that it accurately describes the span of its use.

I saw another article recently that argued that it wasn't the cell phone itself, it was the mere act of having a conversation. To that end, they ought to outlaw passengers, and possibly audiobooks and radio talk shows.

Other potentially distracting things in cars that ought to be outlawed: Crying babies, cute babies, people in backseats, food that is ever-so-slightly out of reach, coffee mugs with lids, coffee mugs without lids, sparkling conversationalists, very sad thoughts, very happy thoughts, glitter.

I have no idea why your points 1-4 are supposed to be in any kind of tension with point 5.  None.  Fatalities per mile driven have been on a multi-decade downward trend.  Why?  In no small part, because organizations such as the National Transportation Safety Board work hard to identify and quantify risk factors, and then recommend ways to reduce them.

So let's refactor the argument a bit:

1. About 33,000 Americans will die in automobile accidents this year.
2. But that's fewer than last year!
3. Therefore, the NTSB should stop worrying about risk factors.

For an encore, we can prove that (a) violent crime is not a problem in America, (b) women should stop grousing about inequality in the workplace, (c) the Environmental Protection Agency can be closed tomorrow, (d) etc., etc.

For me, 33,000 deaths still seems like rather a lot.

This article is making the opposite assumption from what most people make.  Correlation=Causation therefore No Correlation must = No Causation.  Without controlling for many of the factors listed in the comments like improved car safety, improved car control, stricter safety laws, improved emergency response the implied conclusion of the article above is extremely spurious.

Granted, no one actually comes out and SAYS hey maybe the NTSB is full of shit, but that is certainly the implication here.  I don't have time to recreate the NTSB's research on cell phone use in cars.  The writer here has certainly done a poor job of capturing the relationship between cells and car accidents.  So until such time as actual research that has any actual scientific value has been presented to the contrary, I'm going to side with the NTSB.

Your graphs could fit in very well with these:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/correlation-or-causation-12012011-gfx.html

I'm hoping that this post is a classroom exercise in spotting and improving on faulty causal reasoning.

Good causal reasoning from data can be done ( http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/ ) but it requires a bit more than plotting a couple of lines.

As someone who rides a bicycle, I fully support bans on cell-phone use while driving. There have been far too many times where someone almost hit me and I noticed they were on their phone.

Don't get me wrong, people who aren't on their phones drive badly too. But I'd love to remove a source of distraction for people driving cars.

Correlation isn't cause and effect. Lots of things have made driving safer, like seat belts and air bags and improved engineering/design of roads and traffic patterns. But people on their cell phones are more likely to get into crashes, and unlike them, I'm not surrounded by air bags or a bunch of steel. 

Seems to me the only graph that would mean anything would be one that shows the number of mobile phone users and the number of accidents attributed to use of a mobile device.

And here's a bold prediction: you could find a correlation there that is most likely causal.

Draw your own conclusions -- I didn't draw any conclusions from the facts I presented. But it bothers me that I never see the people clamoring for more restrictive laws even acknowledge that the roads are getting much safer, even as cell phone use is increasing. To have an honest, informed debate that weighs safety against liberty, we need to have all the information. The NTSB announcement didn't even mention that fatalities and accident rates have been falling for two decades.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc...?

I won't argue the facts.  BUT...do you (or your wife, mother or father, child, etc.) want to be that single one killed by a driver who was texting or browsing the 'net on their cell phone driving?   My point, one death is still one too many!    I've seen the tragedy and heartbreak caused to families by drivers not paying attention to the road.  Burying a child or a parent or any loved one is not worth the risk involved.  To me, it's akin to drinking and driving.   At what point does that 'one more drink' make a difference between life and death?  At what point does making or reading that one text mean someone lives or dies?  You can throw out all the stats and facts that you like...but it still doesn't change the fact the it is dangerous and CAN cause a needless tragedy and forever change someones life. 

Too many variables to derive any causation or correlation.  No account for better cars, airbags, new laws (re: seat belt usage) -- some states & municipalities banning cellphones along the way -- restrictions on teen drivers, etc.  Poor reasoning.

correlation does not equal causation...

This is absurd. The fact is that human beings are, on average, simply incapable of this kind of multitasking. The human brain just cannot split its attention that way.
http://www.unews.utah.edu/old/p/062206-1.html

It is not a matter of correlating the number of cell phone plans with the number of fatal accidents. 28% of accidents, as of last year, were linked to cell phone usage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/12/AR2010011202218.html

This is a serious piece of science... seriously. Obviously, people who do not own a cell phone are dangerous and should be forbidden to drive.

Cell phones happens also to cure lots of diseases, because while we are talking about driving, the life expectancy of humans is increasing like... something my mum forbids me to say here.

And since the first mobile phone was invented in the 40s, we can deduce that it actually liberated Europe from the Nazis.

Fortunately, the number of bad drivers reduces everyday. They happen to die in car crash.

As my wonderful wife said: Correlation does not imply cause or, in this case, lack of correlation does not imply not cause...

Can you get us stats on the actual tests on the subject rather than stats on overall deaths.. As that would be far more enlightening.. especially since those studies HAVE been completed. Your failure to include these studies is rather shocking really.. unless it was an intentional "mistake".

I would never sell Lisa out, since she is so generous about letting me post to Sociological Images. However, clearly the title of this post "Do Cell Phones Make Driving More Dangerous?" has contributed to confusion. My title for the post was Warning: Personal electronic device ban approaching. And the first line of the post was this: "Let’s just stipulate that using a personal electronic device while
driving increases the risk of an accident and should be avoided." This seems obvious and was never in doubt.

But my intention was to raise doubt about the need for more restrictive laws. Think about the scale of the problem. We know that something like 15% of all drivers are on the phone right now. Then we have the lab and simulation studies that apparently show the extreme effects of talking/texting while driving. My question is not "is it dangerous," but rather "how dangerous is it?" If that many people are doing something that dangerous, I think it would have affected the accident and injury rates more than it has.

It is a face-validity check on the panic reaction to this problem. This is a blog post, a discussion, not scientific research or study. It looks to me like the lab studies overestimate the problem in the real world. I think it's possible these devices are displacing other distractions (like eating or fiddling with the radio). It's also possible some people drive slower or more carefully when they are on the phone, since they know the risks.

For those who suspect I have ulterior motives, or am somehow shading or hiding evidence -- all I can say is that's not true.

Here is the problem: you can't prove this either way using the data. Fatalities are down because cars are safer and we drink and drive less.

The NTSB also just started collecting and publicizing distracted driver data. 3100 fatalities last year, compared to over 10,000 for drunk drivers. But we can't tell whether that is up or down from previous years. No data.

As for pedestrian fatalities, that isn't proof cell phones are dangerous either. Infrastructure -like car dependent neighborhoods without sidewalks - is the more likely cause.

We do, however have some evidence that cell phone bans don't actually work to reduce accidents and fatalities.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-driver-cell-phone-bans-dont-works-insurance-group-finds-20111215,0,5576373.story

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but this is poorly constructed and extremely misleading. You are saying that because A = B and B = C, then A = C. This is in no way, shape, or form a logical argument. 
No one can argue with you on what you present here, it is correct. 
However, you are missing the fundamental point, drivers that USE their cell phone while driving ARE at an increased risk for crashing because of taking their attention away from driving.
I recommend reading research on mediation/moderation in regression to gain a greater understanding of its applied use.

Correlation is not causation. You are certainly not including the many additional safety features that have been included in most vehicles which are most likely responsible for the lower death rates. The chart is very misleading. There is no way to separate one from the other without data that specifically compares vehicle death rates where mobile phone use was a factor against vehicle death rates where mobile phone use was not a factor. Anyone who would argue that use of a mobile phone while driving isn't unsafe is really fooling only themselves. There is plenty of data that would suggest that texting is a primary contributing factor in may vehicle crashes, without a dedicated study, the actual numbers are up for grabs.