28 percent of accidents involve talking, texting on cellphones

Washington Post ^ | January 13, 2010 | Ashley Halsey III

[Mount Athos]

Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Safety Council.

The vast majority of those crashes, 1.4 million annually, are caused by cellphone conversations, and 200,000 are blamed on text messaging.

[a fool in paradise]

that’s higher than the number of “drunk driver” accidents.

Yet some want to continue to permit this type of imparied driving without citation.

[BenLurkin]

http://www.johnspeedie.com/healy/bull.wav

[stephenjohnbanker]

Anyone who text messages while driving should get life without parole.

[heylady]

My daughter and my daughter in law have both swerved into other lanes while texting. My scream was the only thing that made them look up from their phone.

[svcw]

I just read study that AAA says only 6%.

[meyer]

Anyone who text messages while driving should get life without parole.

I play "Mafia Wars" on my iPhone while driving.

j/k :-)

When my mother was sick last year, my sister kept texting me with updates while I was driving to Florida to see her. I tried replying a couple of times with "OK", but gave up and just replied when I stopped somewhere. I don't really know how someone can text while driving anyway.

[djf]

And if you drive home after having two beers, you can get stopped, end up spending tens of thousands of dollars, jail time, losing your license, not to mention your dignity...

And been driving straight as an arrow the whole time.

Note my tag line that I started with more than a week ago!

[meyer]

It’s a pretty big leap to go from “while talking on the phone” to “are caused by”. Just because someone is talking on the phone does not mean that their doing so caused the accident. It may or may not have played a part in the causation of the accident, but until it is shown to have been a factor in any individual accident, it cannot be considered as having caused that accident.

[microgood]

28 percent of accidents involve talking, texting on cellphones

All government statistics are lies and are all put into place for the furtherance of some cause. First you create a crisis, then you solve it. Classic Hegelian dialectic thinking.

[Nova442]

While I agree texting while driving is dangerous to others, I’m not sure how talking on the phone using a hands-free device while driving is any different than talking to a passenger in the car. Yet this study implicates even hands-free talking on the phone.

[I see my hands]

"It’s a pretty big leap to go from 'while talking on the phone' to 'are caused by.'"

There is zero leaping required to go from "while talking on the phone" to "while driving distracted." It's a tiny leap to go from "while driving distracted" to "are caused by."

Where is the pretty big leap?

[gura]

IMHO just about the ONLY bill my state legislature needed to pass this year was a ban on texting while driving and mandating the use of hands-free devices for phone conversations. What’s that, a one week session? They can go back to their day jobs after that as far as I’m concerned.

[socal_parrot]

I use a Bluetooth earpiece when I talk on the cell while driving (I also leave it in the car). People who drive and text are Darwin Award candidates. It’s a shame they’ll probably take someone else with them.

[Domandred]

Hands free talking is better than handling the phone, but still not the same as talking to a person in the car.

The difference is that if the person is in the car with you they can also see what’s going on. They’ll innately pause the conversation when needing too depending on driving conditions.

A person on the other side of the phone can’t see those conditions so they’ll just keep on yaking while the driver runs a stop sign and gets t-boned by a semi-truck.

[meyer]

There is zero leaping required to go from "while talking on the phone" to "while driving distracted."

If "talking on the phone" is a distraction, then so is talking to the person in the seat next to you. As is changing the radio station. Or thinking about what you have to do at work that day. Or daydreaming about the hottie in the car behind you.

Face it - most people are NOT giving undivided attention to the task of driving during the entire course of their trip. I'd venture to say that people aren't paying 100% attention to their driving most of the time. With or without a cell phone.

Unless causation can be proven in any given case, then there is no causation in that particular case.

[Mount Athos]

Good point, correlation is not causation

[US Navy Vet]

AHH the “Safety” “Nazis” shrike again.

[madprof98]

Thank you for stating the obvious here. Most posts on a topic like this actually translate to “Well, I LIKE talking on the phone every minute of my life, and you can’t stop me - So there!”

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

if you drive home after having two beers, you can get stopped, end up spending tens of thousands of dollars, jail time, losing your license, not to mention your dignity...

This is why I NEVER drink and drive during the day. I usually pull over and finish my beers before sundown and toss the empties out the window.

Well, sometimes I keep one empty to pee in...