Thanks, @Dutchess_III. Yeah, PDFs are no fun. I tried to browse through it to see if it contained any statistics bearing out everyone’s fears that we are seeing an increase in accidents, and that this increase is due to cell phone use. I may have missed it, but I saw nothing of the sort in that PDF. Rather, it talked about the kind of distractions that are common (which is my point).
I started driving in 1988. At that time, there were no cell phones (that I was aware of), yet people couldn’t stop talking about distracted drivers.
Let’s take a look at the how dangerous it was to drive in 1988. Here is that list of motor vehicle deaths by year. 47k people were killed that year. That’s a rate of 18.468 deaths per 100,000 people (population). According to that data, in 2013 there were 32k deaths at a rate of 10.345 deaths per 100,000 (population). So, it’s getting safer on the roads.
Sure, this could be due to increased car safety standards or any number of things. But the data is pretty clear – it’s safer now. Yet, the panic people are having about cell phones is not proportionate to the data from what I can see. I would expect to see the data represent a huge bloodbath following cell phone adoption, and an even bigger one following the smartphone “revolution” of 2007. I don’t see it.
Maybe the data is there somewhere. I don’t doubt it’s possible. But I’m just wondering if this whole fear of technology thing is just another example of how people’s perceptions of crime rates are infamously detached from actual crime rates.