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from the just-project-camera-views-onto-the-phone dept.
Zendrive makes technology that monitors how people are driving, so they took the data from 3 million drivers taking 570 million trips over 5.6 billion miles. They found that drivers used their phones for an average of three and a half minutes in 88 out of a hundred trips. From their study:
Everyday, that’s the equivalent of people behind the wheel talking or texting on 5.6-million car rides from our sample alone. When extrapolated for the entire U.S. driving population, the number goes up to roughly 600-million distracted trips a day….This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.
One can download PDFs of the full report and the executive summary.
So that explains the steady stream of accidents despite the prevalence of anti-lock brakes, cameras, and accident avoidance features in passenger vehicles.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:08PM (4 children)
The third link map by state, in the spirit of the famous xkcd comic where most maps are just population maps, appear to be the same as
http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.gif [censusscope.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:36PM
See also: http://www.businessinsider.my/university-of-michigan-car-crash-study-2014-7/ [businessinsider.my]
So there's some correlation of driver phone usage with road fatalities. However there appear to be significant exceptions too.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:58AM (2 children)
I'm not seeing much similarity. The map at your link is labelled "Percentage of a county's population identifying as both black or African-American and non-Hispanic." The highest percentages are in the southeastern part of the U.S.--a legacy of slavery, I assume.
On the map in the article, Vermont is shown as having the greatest "phone use ratio" and Oregon is shown as having the least. On the racial map, both are coloured yellow, indicating no more than 5.3% black or African-American.
As of the 2010 census, Vermont was the second-whitest state in the Union after Maine.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont#Population_characteristics [wikipedia.org]
Maine has intermediate phone usage. As for Oregon (emphasis mine),
In 2010, 78.5% of the population was white alone (meaning of no other race and non-Hispanic), 1.7% was black or African American alone, 1.1% was Native American or Alaska native alone, 3.6% was Asian alone, 0.3% was Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone, 0.1% was another race alone, and 2.9% was multiracial. Hispanics or Latinos made up 11.7% of the total population.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon [wikipedia.org]
Some states in the southeast are shown as having high phone usage, but so are several in the central part of the country, and in the northeast. Really the whole eastern part has middling to high usage, and the usage is middling to low in the western part.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:39PM (1 child)
Your individual anecdotes are probably correct but the most striking part of the 3rd link to "looking at the phone" was the general red glow from the american south. Which is in fact a legacy of slavery as you mention.
I'd be willing to throw down other cultural southern characteristics. Obviously consuming chicken -n- waffles results in looking at your phone while driving. Ditto cornmeal grits and sweetened iced tea.
Another correlation is not causation (or ... is it?) is the paragraph above everything is both very unhealthy to eat, and incredibly delicious.
None the less the maps are similar enough such that if you look around while you're driving and most of the drivers around you are black folks, then odds are high most of the people are looking at their phones, regardless of cause and effect.
Some programmer is going to put that in a self driving car ruleset and get accused of racism. A lot of real world facts are racist, LOL.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:28PM
> Your individual anecdotes are probably correct but the most striking part of the 3rd link to "looking at the phone" was the general red glow from the american south.
Are we looking at the same thing? I'm unsure what you mean by the third link, but I looked at a map, labelled "Phone Use Ratio," that is part of the article:
http://blog.zendrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Phoneuse-Map-500x348.png [zendrive.com]
On that map, dark red indicates more frequent use, whilst yellow denotes less use. The states shaded most darkly are all in the east--including the northeast; those coloured yellow are all in the west. It appears that New York and New Hampshire are coloured the same as Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the same as Alabama, and Connecticut and New Jersey are the same as Alabama and Arkansas, etc. There does indeed appear to be especially high usage in Mississippi and Louisiana, but as I remarked the highest is in Vermont.
None the less the maps are similar enough such that if you look around while you're driving and most of the drivers around you are black folks, then odds are high most of the people are looking at their phones, regardless of cause and effect.
I wondered whether that was your meaning. Disregarding the northeastern and central parts of the United States, the maps are indeed similar. Choosing to disregard them strikes me as a cognitive bias.
> A lot of real world facts are racist, LOL.
Like the link between green jelly beans and acne.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant [explainxkcd.com]