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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: 3, Insightful) by BenJeremy on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:51PM (2 children)
Seriously, just back away from the keyboard before typing nonsense like that.
Glancing at your phone isn't causing "all those" accidents. There are lots of factors. Inattentiveness caused by distractions like phones are certainly a factor, but if you are driving in an open stretch of road, with reasonable control, checking the wife's last minute request to pick up something on the way home, or to review a traffic alert, isn't going to cause you to crash.
That said, tailgating, a bad practice without distractions, combined with the same activity, can mean trouble. Looking at your phone while otherwise driving badly, can most certainly lead to bad things.
If that 88% always got into accidents the moment they checked their phones... the highways would be nothing but endless junkyards of burned out wrecks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:24PM (1 child)
But that does not mean that a person who texts and drives is an inattentive driver.
Causation versus Correlation. How does it work?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 25 2017, @04:50PM
Kind of by definition, yes, yes it does. Next you'll claim that it's possible that someone can be shitfaced drunk and still driving safely.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"