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Biggest Spike in Traffic Deaths in 50 Years? Blame Apps

201 points by kanamekun 10y ago

finid 10y ago
Blame apps? No, that's secondary. Blame smartphones. Perhaps that too is secondary. Blame humans.
- mozumder 10y ago
  So, mass transit.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Humans were around before this development though.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  Smartphones, and mobile phones in general, make drivers less attentive to external events while driving. It was fine before that, so I don't see why you think we should be blaming humans?
  - aswanson 10y ago
    Because it wasn't fine before that. Most drivers take irrational risks, drive with zero margin, and are generally fucking stupid behind the wheel. The other half are even worse. Seriously, there needs to be far more restrictions and punitive damages to bad drivers. With all the media attention on terrorism, there are 10 times as many deaths in the US every year due to stupid drivers as there were on 9-11.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      I agree completely, but the human factor will only be removed once we have fully autonomous vehicles. Until then, we need humans to operate vehicles; this is the base case. Now, do smartphones make humans worse at driving, or does their use while driving still result in the base case? My argument is that smartphone use does in fact significantly worsen a human's ability to drive properly. As a result, I believe that, for the time being, we need to somehow tackle the issue of smartphone use while operating a vehicle.
      - aswanson 10y ago
        Agreed.
  - finid 10y ago
    You have to address the root cause - humans, because before smartphones and their apps, it was being distracted while fiddling with CD/tape players. Eating and applying makeup (women) also contributed. Humans have to recognize that driving demands 100% of their attention.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      We will eventually address the root cause; self-driving cars are around the corner. Unfortunately, we cannot do that now. Therefore, we should address the second biggest cause: smartphones. Besides, eating, doing make-up, and fiddling with a CD player are absolutely nothing compared to what people do on smartphones nowadays while cruising in a hunk of metal at 60 mph.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
The UK, Germany and Austria have banned the use of phones in cars entirely with a whitelist of permitted uses (like passively using it for navigation). I am pretty sure that is something that is happening all over Europe now.
- rconti 10y ago
  Welp, shit, just got back from breaking that particular law in Germany. Better late than never, I guess.
- chad_oliver 10y ago
  New Zealand too. If you want to make calls while driving, you have to have a hands-free system. It baffles my mind that there are countries in which people can legally interact with their phone while driving.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I'm surprised people are allowed to use their phones at all; there is a study showing talking on a hands free causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol.
    - miaumiau2 10y ago
      So you are saying, talking to a passenger "causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol."? For sure there is a distraction, but it is definitely not on the level you described.
      - tajen 10y ago
        Mythbusters tested it! http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2015/08/21/mythbusters-tests-the-myth-of-hands-free-driving-at-stanfords-automotive-facility/ http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2015/08/21/mythbusters-test... and https://youtu.be/t8LuM92Twm8?t=210 https://youtu.be/t8LuM92Twm8?t=210 (see the conclusion at 3:28). Result: Driving drunk, with a cellphone or with a hands-free phone were all equally dangerous. I'm as surprised as you must be. They didn't test talking to a passenger, but I'm of the opinion that laws don't forbid what is de-facto considered as normal by most people. Besides, talking to a passenger isn't verifiable. Last thing, I sure remember unfolding my map over the wheel on the highways, so despite what the police says about vocal GPS apps, they're still 100% better for me.
roflchoppa 10y ago
http://www.thedrive.com/opinion/5979/we-need-an-nra-type-lobby-for-human-driving http://www.thedrive.com/opinion/5979/we-need-an-nra-type-lob... Ill admit, I have not read it yet, I'm reading an ecology paper currently, but I will read it tonight.
- atomical 10y ago
  Weird. I thought you were currently writing this comment.
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    u following me?!
grandalf 10y ago
Not necessarily just apps, how about IOS: The worst for me is the delay in rendering the bar that occupies the top of the screen when navigation is in use or when tethering is in use. I often look at the screen, then tap, but in between those events the bar appears and receives my click. It's nearly always inconvenient to get the phone back to the intended screen. It seems that the delayed appearance of the bar is an intentional UI 'feature' because in all cases the state is known prior to waking the phone.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Yeah there is nothing more annoying than looking at where Waze wants me to make the next crazy turn and the directions are blocked by a notification. I take my eyes off the rainy, busy road to ensure I am turning into the right street and instead see that I received recruiter spam.
yk 10y ago
What does a journalist think when he writes something like "biggest spike in traffic death in 50 years"? The NYT even has a nice plot, that clearly shows that there are two, perhaps three significant, spikes in traffic death, and overall traffic death were reduced to a third of the late seventies. I mean I just eyeball the plot, but to me it seems the story is that there is a plateau since ~2010.
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  > After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. So I guess the title makes sense, but I think it's extremely misleading.
  - pwg 10y ago
    It is - and it is a title that is misleadingly designed to be "click bait".
- 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
  Yes. It's just noise. But I guess it's hard to write a story about how nothing has changed in decades.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  "Think of all the clicks we're gonna get!"
et-al 10y ago
As an aside, sometimes I wonder about how much more efficient we are today due to smartphones. Places where we've lost time: - at the stoplight, the driver in front of you is too busy looking down to notice the light has changed - in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet - on the sidewalk, folks walk slower because they're pre-occupied with texting - meeting up with friends, it's more acceptable to be late because one can always send a last minute update, "I'll be there in 10 minutes!" (read: just got on lyft) - even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email." I know of digital detoxes (gag), but the inevitable seems to be this distracted-presence as our new reality (until we go full virtual-reality).
- nilved 10y ago
  If those people weren't reading news or playing games on the toilet, they would be reading shampoo bottles. In periods of downtime people need something to do and smartphones can make that time more effective (when not used to look at cats.)
  - c22 10y ago
    But when you're done with the toilet it's easy to put down the shampoo bottle. It's easier still to sit there for another ten minutes on a page like tumblr or Facebook which endlessly scrolls.
- m3rc 10y ago
  Humans have a pretty infinite ability to fill time, and to always find something new they "should" be doing. Early household cleaning appliances like the vacuum sold on promises of freeing up housewife's time to do other things, but people spend just as long cleaning their houses now as they did pre vacuum. We just sort of... do things, and it's very difficult to map the relationship between an object and its impact on how much time we spend interacting with it
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think you are spot on with the bathroom. It's unbelievable to me how much time people seem to spend in there now. The last two times I've arrived in SFO and went to the bathroom I had to wait for a stall I ended up waiting about 5 minutes till anyone came out of the stalls. Meanwhile you hear notification sounds coming out of some of them. Likewise at work some people disappear in the bathroom for close to 30 minutes. I am becoming more and more in favor of installing jammers in public bathrooms.
Animats 10y ago
We need automatic driving so people can remain connected. Volvo has the right vision. See their commercial.[1] (\Volvo is about to be the first with production automatic driving. Next year, Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars on the road with real customers driving. They'll only self-drive on certain roads in Gothenburg at first. The user is not required to watch the road, and if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility. Tesla talks big, but Volvo gets it and has it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA
- ams6110 10y ago
  if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility Nice comfort I'm sure as you lie in your casket.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    There's an old saying "Put your money where your mouth is". I think the idea of mentioning it is that it is a comfort as you hand control of the car over to the automated system.
    - hvidgaard 10y ago
      If only Volvo wasn't as expensive, or boring to drive.
      - scott_karana 10y ago
        Expensive compared to Tesla?!
        hvidgaard 10y ago
        Compared to other manufactures. We have 150% tax beyond 25% VAT, to make matters worse, there is hardly any tax on micro cars, so price differences are exacerbated greatly. For the price of an estate Volvo, one can buy no less than 6 micro cars.
bbarn 10y ago
I'm of the belief that while phones have contributed, it's just not hard enough to drive anymore. Try driving a manual shift, non power steering vehicle some time and using your phone. That's the world the roads were built for, not this ultra easy, power assisted, auto-speed control, auto-lane control world where you don't even feel the speed difference between 60 and 90. I used to hear people say they couldn't drive without the radio because they "needed the distraction". I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving? All the hands free apps in the world can't solve split focus. Even a bluetooth, voice activated system requires you to commit brain cycles to the conversation that's coming through that will take away from your ability to drive. We sit and argue about how bad context switching is, how important it is in our careers as developers to focus on what we're doing, then we build apps and devices that are competing to be the best attention stealing devices they can be.
- viraptor 10y ago
  > I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving? Kind of. There are different studies showing various kinds of impact. For example: http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics/oer00144 http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics... "Music seems to alleviate driver stress and mild aggression while at times facilitating performance. However, during other conditions of music, driving performance is impaired." My own experience is that without music or a podcast in the background I get tired much more quickly. (as in, can do 3h drive without getting exhausted -vs- 1-2h) Because if only thing you have is the engine noise and road ahead, that's the only thing you can focus on, and things really don't change that often. (if your mind doesn't start to wonder / phase out in those conditions - great; mine does) It also helps in the evening a lot. If the whole world is just a cone of light 50m ahead, my mind starts to wonder, or just get sleepy really quickly. Having something unrelated that keeps you mildly interested, but not taking attention seems like a good solution.
- niftich 10y ago
  In all fairness, the 65-70 mph posted on most rural interstates is usually an uneventfully featureless speed, on uneventful, featureless roads. Meanwhile the urban grandfathered interstates are like NASCAR with a concrete wall to one side, and ruthless traffic inches to your side. And even sometimes on a suburban parkway signed for 45, with four lanes going the same way, you fear for your life as SUVs heading home from work weave around you to get two cars ahead. There is a wide variance in driving difficulty throughout the day, even on the same stretch of road, and varying with the amount and nature of traffic, the sun in your eyes, wind, the weather. And as you say, driver assist and safety systems like widespread adaptive cruise control, electronic stability control, blind spot warning, emergency brake assist, and curtain airbags encourage a style of driving that's 'not truly defensive' at best, oblivious at worst. Because why not go the speed limit if cars are so safe and they've got your back? This isn't misplaced nostalgia for the days when driving was more dangerous, but I do believe as cars get safer, situational awareness worsens and riskier behaviors are less likely to result in serious accidents -- so some drivers continue to take more risks.
niftich 10y ago
Apps are a plausible contributor. But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it. Luckily, some manufacturers go the other route and put music controls as paddles on the steering wheel, which is amazingly useful. Also, the widespread 'safety feature' of cars refusing to pair bluetooth while in motion may actually defeat the point. If one forgets to pair in the beginning, they may just keep using the phone when the need arises -- when a notification arrives, the phone rings, or they remember they want to stream some music.
- m3rc 10y ago
  I can't stand touchscreen systems. Instead of a single physical switch to turn AC on or off it's two latency laden taps. Part of it's menu design but I can't help but feel like it's always gonna happen with touchscreen centric designs.
  - ux-app 10y ago
    That's poor design. My wife's new car has physical buttons for all the common functions that you might require to use while in motion: - Radio on/off - All radio controls on the wheel - Heating/cooling, physical knobs The touchscreen is treated as an optional, secondary interface, as it rightfully should be.
    - rat87 10y ago
      Just Radio? I'm assuming people are listening to podcasts/Pandora/spotify/audiobooks just as frequently , not to mention looking at/listening to directions. And it doesn't even have a siri/google assistant button? I'd consider that vital.
      - ygra 10y ago
        It would work the same for anything your phone provides if it's connected via Bluetooth. There's likely also a way to get to Siri like on pretty much all Bluetooth headsets.
hurbledr 10y ago
This article neglected to mention the apps most often used while driving, map apps.
- megablast 10y ago
  I bet facebook would be number one.
perseusprime11 10y ago
I've seen so many drivers either texting or using their phones while driving and not paying attention to traffic signals, stop signs, and pedestrian crossings. I wish there was a way to stop smartphones from displaying notifications and other things that distract users.
bigethan 10y ago
As a cyclist in SF, Uber/Lyft drivers are the most dangerous thing going. They're driving by staring at their phone's map for directions and pickup/dropoff. Once they stop, they stare at their phone for the next ride. Very little situational awareness. It'd be nice if there was some sort of way for them to indicate they drive erratically. Perhaps by painting their cars all yellow or something...
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  My one and only experience using Uber was with a driver who had no clue where anything was, clearly wasn't from around the place, and from what I could tell violated two traffic laws. So what do I do, give him a bad rating? No, because this person probably needed the money, and a rating under 4.5 gets you shitcanned in an already rigged system. Quite the revolution indeed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - wvenable 10y ago
    Isn't that the point of the rating system? I don't want to be killed by my next Uber ride because you feel bad rating them appropriately. I've never had a bad Uber experience but I have had some downright frightening cab rides and I'd love to be able to rate that.
    - edgyswingset 10y ago
      Yes, except it's not really a fair system. A 4.5/5.0, to me, is an excellent score. That's an A- if it were a grade on a math test. Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked. How does that make sense? It isn't a system in which I can fairly and accurately vote someone's work.
      - hueving 10y ago
        Continuing the test analogy, I don't want to eat at a restaurant that got rated a B by the health department. There are many cases where not being good enough to get an A- means you aren't good enough to do it professionally. This is no different.
lettergram 10y ago
I don't know why this is bothering me... But does anyone know why the title wasn't: "largest spike in..." As opposed to "biggest spike in..."?
- Hondor 10y ago
  What's the difference? Biggest sounds more familiar to me. Maybe local cultures differ? For that matter, why would you ever need the word "large"? Doesn't "big" always have the same meaning?
Scoundreller 10y ago
The article fails to provide any statistics to show that apps are the cause. It just publishes a few case reports where apps were involved in an accident, and notes an uptick in traffic fatalities. I think apps have reduced my chance of causing a traffic death: My cognitive load for driving is much less than it used to be. I no longer need to scan my environment for street signs, store signs or exit signs. I never need to look at a physical map/notes. If I miss a turn/exit, I'll recover. I don't have to suddenly shift lanes because I'll be in the correct lane a kilometer or two before the actual exit. Confusing signs telling me which lane to use are a non-issue. I'll also drive fewer kilometers because of optimized routing. Sometimes it's more, but that's because I'll be diverting around congestion. I can also wait out the traffic and know exactly when to leave at a time that has fewer cars on the road. Music streaming apps mean I don't have to fumble through radio stations, or clunky physical media.
- embiggen 10y ago
  Polar Opposite of other parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12964329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12964329 Both purport situational awareness" to have vastly different consequences and effects.
  - Scoundreller 10y ago
    In my locale, possibly for legal/insurance reasons, Uber drivers far too often keep their phones very low, and out of sight from other vehicles. Therefore, they have to keep looking far down. For Uber drivers, the app is like a slot machine: you have to keep checking/interacting with it, lest you miss your next fare. With a navapp in a personal car, if it says I need to take no action for the next 1/10/100km, I know I can focus on the vehicles around me instead of signs for roughly that time.
apsec112 10y ago
Headline: "Blame Apps" Evidence given in the article: - "Safety experts say" that it's true. The experts are not named or quoted. No evidence or reasoning is given to support the claim. - Highway fatalities are up this year. However, they're still significantly down from 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. Mobile has been booming for almost a decade - if we should "blame apps", why hasn't it been a concern before now? - One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness. - "Insurance companies are convinced", according to one Robert Gordon. Gordon is actually named and quoted. However, the quote again doesn't provide evidence or reasoning. Maybe it is actually true. I don't know. However, the evidence given is nowhere near strong enough to be convincing. There's also the issue that newspapers are direct competitors with the apps they're railing against (for ad dollars), and have been losing badly: http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newspaperadsdecline2.jpg http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newsp....
- Plasticover 10y ago
  "One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness." The Snapchat was taken by the passenger. They were even hinting at racing being a factor. It seems like a bad example all around. I am sure apps contribute to some road fatalities but this was clearly a case of a driver crashing because they were going 115 miles a fucking hour on a populated road.
- hueving 10y ago
  Standard NY times reporting quality. You have to take it with a grain of salt or be in a position where their editorial viewpoint aligns with yours enough for you to ignore these evidence requirements.
- mck- 10y ago
  Next decade, the NYT will run another story titled: "Biggest drop in traffic deaths in 60 years". Autonomous cars are around the corner and it's the only way to truly make a leap forward in terms of traffic safety. And people can spend even more time on their apps while commuting, uninterrupted by this soon-to-be-forgotten distraction called "manual driving". Incidentally wrote a blog about this today: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/safer-roads-and-cleaner-air-with-autonomous-fleets-91b5d879be68#.1m9yo6lm7 https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/safer-roads-and-cleaner...
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
Incredibly misleading title/premise. Should be titled: "Traffic deaths slightly spike, but remain lower than 2008 or any other year after 1956." It has increased slightly since 2011, but less than 10%. What we might be seeing is that vehicle deaths has plateaued. We kept seeing decreases because technology kept being introduced (e.g. seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, crumple zones, partial overlap resistance, safety cages, better safety testing, etc). That kind of slowed at the end of the 2000s and is now picking up again (e.g. automatic braking, lane keep assist, blind spot warning, cross traffic alert, backup cameras, full automation, etc). The whole article is trying to manufacture a story out of statistical noise. We'd need more data (more years) to even start to speculate on an actual increase in deaths.
pash 10y ago
The author neglected to mention that miles driven in the United States increased by a record 107.5 billion last year, up 3.5% [0]. Even at 2014's all-time low death rate of 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled [1], that increase in driving would lead us to expect 1,161 more deaths on the roads. There were actually 2,417 (7.4%) more deaths in 2015 than in 2014, so the increase in driving accounts for "only" 48% of the increase in deaths. What accounts for the rest? More notable than the increase in deaths is that the death rate increased from 1.08 per 100 million VMT to 1.12 (3.7%), only the second year-on-year increase in the death rate in the past two decades. The only other increase in the death rate occurred between 2011 and 2012, and the biggest decreases in the death rate over the past two decades occurred in 2007–8 and 2008–9. What was happening in those years? First the Great Recession, then an economic recovery. The years of the Great Recession were saw the steepest declines in miles driven in decades, and the last several years of economic recovery have seen the sharpest increases in driving (to an all-time high last year). The recession years were also the only years vehicle registrations fell in recent decades, and the number of licensed drivers flatlined for the first time since the previous recession in the early 2000s; licenses and registrations ticked up again during the recovery years, and were up strongly in 2014 [2]. So we saw the death rate fall as the recession hit and people drove less, fewer people got licensed to drive, and fewer vehicles were on the road. Then during the recovery we saw the only increases in the death rate in decades, as people started driving more and more new drivers got licensed and hit the roads. Here's a hypothesis: the death rate fell sharply during the recession because (a) fewer cars were on the road, making roads safer, and especially because (b) the cohort of drivers changed, shifting older, more experienced, and more cautious as fewer young people (who were hit hardest by the economic downtown, and who have the highest rate of death by car) could afford to drive. Then during the recovery those changes reversed and people began to die on the roads at a higher rate. Corollary: this article about apps causing driving deaths is mostly journalistic nonsense. 0. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/15dectvt/ http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/... 1. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx 2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2014/dv1c.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2014/d...
dmalvarado 10y ago
If one believes the premise, this is a situation where better voice control could literally save lives, as well as my sanity. "Text John" "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now" ...
_audakel 10y ago
Other side of the coin is that law makers who have held up self driving cars and govt not funding enough grants is to blame
itaysk 10y ago
Expected to see a nice big chart showing the spike. was disappointed so didn't read the article :\
pasta 10y ago
I'm not sure if it's apps alone. At least in The Netherlands I'm seeing multiple reasons for this (we are also seeing a spike in accidents): * Cars are too easy to drive. Drivers have no clue about speed and danger. This is especially true for trucks. You can steer tons with your finger, but you have no idea about the real powers going on. * Individualization: The 'fuck you' way of driving. * Social media.
- Someone 10y ago
  In the Netherlands, a possible cause also is cyclists using mobile phones in traffic. Bicycles apparently are too easy to drive with all that nice infrastructure.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
I drive three to four hours a day in Los Angeles a few times a week, mostly on the 405. The number of people I see looking down or down an to the right at their phones is staggering. Now I can call it from afar because there's a commonality to the lack of speed control and lane keeping. They meander left-right on the lane, don't maintain speed and break abruptly as they look at traffic and have to re-synchronize with it. So, yeah, I don't know if I'd blame apps in particular but the advent of "smart" phones is definitely having an impact on our highways and, from what I see often enough, it isn't positive.
gog 10y ago
This link takes me to the login page.
maartendb 10y ago
You'll probably can't prevent this. That's why cars should be self-driving asap and common safety features like autonomous emergency braking, lane assist have to be mandatory in the meantime.
S_A_P 10y ago
With cars being built to safety standards that make cars from even 1-2decades ago seem like tin cans, - spike in traffic deaths as I see it is likely due to: 1) distracted driving/apps 2) increase in prescription pill usage/drunk driving. I don't think it's #2 at all. I don't need statistics to tell me that I am on of few drivers that puts my telephone in my pocket/center console so that I don't look at it. I will cop to hands free telephone talking and I admit it makes me a worse driver, but at least I have my eyes on the road. Bad journalism or not this is a real, infuriating, DANGEROUS, and completely preventable problem. I also can't believe how many people don't want to hear that they are doing something that makes them much more dangerous and much more likely to have an accident. I guess people just don't "feel" like it's wrong if they're sober. I am hoping that autonous cars are cheap and safe before my 9 year old starts driving. People don't seem capable in general of choosing either texting or driving and not both.
vermontdevil 10y ago
No mention of lower gas prices which means more driving ? I'll be curious to see if this had a bigger impact than apps.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cmdrfred 10y ago
This appears to be a false premise, traffic deaths per miles driven shows a rather steady decline according to wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths...
london888 10y ago
I wonder if mobile phones have been responsible for more deaths or more lives saved over the past 10 years, and how you could attempt to calculate it.
- rubidium 10y ago
  Sounds like a good PhD project.
emodendroket 10y ago
Every time I ride a taxi or something I'm stunned by how many drivers I see futzing around with their phones. I don't find it hard to believe. > When distracted driving entered the national consciousness a decade ago, the problem was mainly people who made calls or sent texts from their cellphones. The solution then was to introduce new technologies to keep drivers’ hands on the wheel. Which by the way don't help
painted 10y ago
what about the increasingly number of auto-vehicles? how about the increase in the speeds people travel at? how about the materials the cars are made nowadays compared to 50 years ago?
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  The materials cars are made of today vs 50 years ago are much safer.
tdkl 10y ago
I think someone wants to sell some more hands free solutions before the holiday season, so lets use some bogus "evidence" to make choices easier. Oh look, it just may happen that some tech companies are offering some that aren't selling well !
DeAndre222 10y ago
I know some professional hackers who has worked for me twice in the past one month. They are very good at hacking anything concerning database, emails & social media and even helps to retrieve accounts that have been taken by hackers bluewidowpass@hackermail.com

201 points by kanamekun 10y ago

finid 10y ago

Blame apps? No, that's secondary. Blame smartphones. Perhaps that too is secondary. Blame humans.

mozumder 10y ago
So, mass transit.
BurningFrog 10y ago
Humans were around before this development though.
Cyph0n 10y ago
Smartphones, and mobile phones in general, make drivers less attentive to external events while driving. It was fine before that, so I don't see why you think we should be blaming humans?
- aswanson 10y ago
  Because it wasn't fine before that. Most drivers take irrational risks, drive with zero margin, and are generally fucking stupid behind the wheel. The other half are even worse. Seriously, there needs to be far more restrictions and punitive damages to bad drivers. With all the media attention on terrorism, there are 10 times as many deaths in the US every year due to stupid drivers as there were on 9-11.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I agree completely, but the human factor will only be removed once we have fully autonomous vehicles. Until then, we need humans to operate vehicles; this is the base case. Now, do smartphones make humans worse at driving, or does their use while driving still result in the base case? My argument is that smartphone use does in fact significantly worsen a human's ability to drive properly. As a result, I believe that, for the time being, we need to somehow tackle the issue of smartphone use while operating a vehicle.
    - aswanson 10y ago
      Agreed.
- finid 10y ago
  You have to address the root cause - humans, because before smartphones and their apps, it was being distracted while fiddling with CD/tape players. Eating and applying makeup (women) also contributed. Humans have to recognize that driving demands 100% of their attention.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    We will eventually address the root cause; self-driving cars are around the corner. Unfortunately, we cannot do that now. Therefore, we should address the second biggest cause: smartphones. Besides, eating, doing make-up, and fiddling with a CD player are absolutely nothing compared to what people do on smartphones nowadays while cruising in a hunk of metal at 60 mph.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

The UK, Germany and Austria have banned the use of phones in cars entirely with a whitelist of permitted uses (like passively using it for navigation). I am pretty sure that is something that is happening all over Europe now.

rconti 10y ago
Welp, shit, just got back from breaking that particular law in Germany. Better late than never, I guess.
chad_oliver 10y ago
New Zealand too. If you want to make calls while driving, you have to have a hands-free system. It baffles my mind that there are countries in which people can legally interact with their phone while driving.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I'm surprised people are allowed to use their phones at all; there is a study showing talking on a hands free causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol.
  - miaumiau2 10y ago
    So you are saying, talking to a passenger "causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol."? For sure there is a distraction, but it is definitely not on the level you described.
    - tajen 10y ago
      Mythbusters tested it! http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2015/08/21/mythbusters-tests-the-myth-of-hands-free-driving-at-stanfords-automotive-facility/ http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2015/08/21/mythbusters-test... and https://youtu.be/t8LuM92Twm8?t=210 https://youtu.be/t8LuM92Twm8?t=210 (see the conclusion at 3:28). Result: Driving drunk, with a cellphone or with a hands-free phone were all equally dangerous. I'm as surprised as you must be. They didn't test talking to a passenger, but I'm of the opinion that laws don't forbid what is de-facto considered as normal by most people. Besides, talking to a passenger isn't verifiable. Last thing, I sure remember unfolding my map over the wheel on the highways, so despite what the police says about vocal GPS apps, they're still 100% better for me.

roflchoppa 10y ago

http://www.thedrive.com/opinion/5979/we-need-an-nra-type-lobby-for-human-driving http://www.thedrive.com/opinion/5979/we-need-an-nra-type-lob... Ill admit, I have not read it yet, I'm reading an ecology paper currently, but I will read it tonight.

atomical 10y ago
Weird. I thought you were currently writing this comment.
- roflchoppa 10y ago
  u following me?!

grandalf 10y ago

Not necessarily just apps, how about IOS: The worst for me is the delay in rendering the bar that occupies the top of the screen when navigation is in use or when tethering is in use. I often look at the screen, then tap, but in between those events the bar appears and receives my click. It's nearly always inconvenient to get the phone back to the intended screen. It seems that the delayed appearance of the bar is an intentional UI 'feature' because in all cases the state is known prior to waking the phone.

ajmurmann 10y ago
Yeah there is nothing more annoying than looking at where Waze wants me to make the next crazy turn and the directions are blocked by a notification. I take my eyes off the rainy, busy road to ensure I am turning into the right street and instead see that I received recruiter spam.

yk 10y ago

What does a journalist think when he writes something like "biggest spike in traffic death in 50 years"? The NYT even has a nice plot, that clearly shows that there are two, perhaps three significant, spikes in traffic death, and overall traffic death were reduced to a third of the late seventies. I mean I just eyeball the plot, but to me it seems the story is that there is a plateau since ~2010.

squeaky-clean 10y ago
> After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. So I guess the title makes sense, but I think it's extremely misleading.
- pwg 10y ago
  It is - and it is a title that is misleadingly designed to be "click bait".
88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
Yes. It's just noise. But I guess it's hard to write a story about how nothing has changed in decades.
kalleboo 10y ago
"Think of all the clicks we're gonna get!"

et-al 10y ago

As an aside, sometimes I wonder about how much more efficient we are today due to smartphones. Places where we've lost time: - at the stoplight, the driver in front of you is too busy looking down to notice the light has changed - in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet - on the sidewalk, folks walk slower because they're pre-occupied with texting - meeting up with friends, it's more acceptable to be late because one can always send a last minute update, "I'll be there in 10 minutes!" (read: just got on lyft) - even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email." I know of digital detoxes (gag), but the inevitable seems to be this distracted-presence as our new reality (until we go full virtual-reality).

nilved 10y ago
If those people weren't reading news or playing games on the toilet, they would be reading shampoo bottles. In periods of downtime people need something to do and smartphones can make that time more effective (when not used to look at cats.)
- c22 10y ago
  But when you're done with the toilet it's easy to put down the shampoo bottle. It's easier still to sit there for another ten minutes on a page like tumblr or Facebook which endlessly scrolls.
m3rc 10y ago
Humans have a pretty infinite ability to fill time, and to always find something new they "should" be doing. Early household cleaning appliances like the vacuum sold on promises of freeing up housewife's time to do other things, but people spend just as long cleaning their houses now as they did pre vacuum. We just sort of... do things, and it's very difficult to map the relationship between an object and its impact on how much time we spend interacting with it
ajmurmann 10y ago
I think you are spot on with the bathroom. It's unbelievable to me how much time people seem to spend in there now. The last two times I've arrived in SFO and went to the bathroom I had to wait for a stall I ended up waiting about 5 minutes till anyone came out of the stalls. Meanwhile you hear notification sounds coming out of some of them. Likewise at work some people disappear in the bathroom for close to 30 minutes. I am becoming more and more in favor of installing jammers in public bathrooms.

Animats 10y ago

We need automatic driving so people can remain connected. Volvo has the right vision. See their commercial.[1] (\Volvo is about to be the first with production automatic driving. Next year, Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars on the road with real customers driving. They'll only self-drive on certain roads in Gothenburg at first. The user is not required to watch the road, and if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility. Tesla talks big, but Volvo gets it and has it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA

ams6110 10y ago
if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility Nice comfort I'm sure as you lie in your casket.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  There's an old saying "Put your money where your mouth is". I think the idea of mentioning it is that it is a comfort as you hand control of the car over to the automated system.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    If only Volvo wasn't as expensive, or boring to drive.
    - scott_karana 10y ago
      Expensive compared to Tesla?!
      - hvidgaard 10y ago
        Compared to other manufactures. We have 150% tax beyond 25% VAT, to make matters worse, there is hardly any tax on micro cars, so price differences are exacerbated greatly. For the price of an estate Volvo, one can buy no less than 6 micro cars.

bbarn 10y ago

I'm of the belief that while phones have contributed, it's just not hard enough to drive anymore. Try driving a manual shift, non power steering vehicle some time and using your phone. That's the world the roads were built for, not this ultra easy, power assisted, auto-speed control, auto-lane control world where you don't even feel the speed difference between 60 and 90. I used to hear people say they couldn't drive without the radio because they "needed the distraction". I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving? All the hands free apps in the world can't solve split focus. Even a bluetooth, voice activated system requires you to commit brain cycles to the conversation that's coming through that will take away from your ability to drive. We sit and argue about how bad context switching is, how important it is in our careers as developers to focus on what we're doing, then we build apps and devices that are competing to be the best attention stealing devices they can be.

viraptor 10y ago
> I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving? Kind of. There are different studies showing various kinds of impact. For example: http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics/oer00144 http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics... "Music seems to alleviate driver stress and mild aggression while at times facilitating performance. However, during other conditions of music, driving performance is impaired." My own experience is that without music or a podcast in the background I get tired much more quickly. (as in, can do 3h drive without getting exhausted -vs- 1-2h) Because if only thing you have is the engine noise and road ahead, that's the only thing you can focus on, and things really don't change that often. (if your mind doesn't start to wonder / phase out in those conditions - great; mine does) It also helps in the evening a lot. If the whole world is just a cone of light 50m ahead, my mind starts to wonder, or just get sleepy really quickly. Having something unrelated that keeps you mildly interested, but not taking attention seems like a good solution.
niftich 10y ago
In all fairness, the 65-70 mph posted on most rural interstates is usually an uneventfully featureless speed, on uneventful, featureless roads. Meanwhile the urban grandfathered interstates are like NASCAR with a concrete wall to one side, and ruthless traffic inches to your side. And even sometimes on a suburban parkway signed for 45, with four lanes going the same way, you fear for your life as SUVs heading home from work weave around you to get two cars ahead. There is a wide variance in driving difficulty throughout the day, even on the same stretch of road, and varying with the amount and nature of traffic, the sun in your eyes, wind, the weather. And as you say, driver assist and safety systems like widespread adaptive cruise control, electronic stability control, blind spot warning, emergency brake assist, and curtain airbags encourage a style of driving that's 'not truly defensive' at best, oblivious at worst. Because why not go the speed limit if cars are so safe and they've got your back? This isn't misplaced nostalgia for the days when driving was more dangerous, but I do believe as cars get safer, situational awareness worsens and riskier behaviors are less likely to result in serious accidents -- so some drivers continue to take more risks.

niftich 10y ago

Apps are a plausible contributor. But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it. Luckily, some manufacturers go the other route and put music controls as paddles on the steering wheel, which is amazingly useful. Also, the widespread 'safety feature' of cars refusing to pair bluetooth while in motion may actually defeat the point. If one forgets to pair in the beginning, they may just keep using the phone when the need arises -- when a notification arrives, the phone rings, or they remember they want to stream some music.

m3rc 10y ago
I can't stand touchscreen systems. Instead of a single physical switch to turn AC on or off it's two latency laden taps. Part of it's menu design but I can't help but feel like it's always gonna happen with touchscreen centric designs.
- ux-app 10y ago
  That's poor design. My wife's new car has physical buttons for all the common functions that you might require to use while in motion: - Radio on/off - All radio controls on the wheel - Heating/cooling, physical knobs The touchscreen is treated as an optional, secondary interface, as it rightfully should be.
  - rat87 10y ago
    Just Radio? I'm assuming people are listening to podcasts/Pandora/spotify/audiobooks just as frequently , not to mention looking at/listening to directions. And it doesn't even have a siri/google assistant button? I'd consider that vital.
    - ygra 10y ago
      It would work the same for anything your phone provides if it's connected via Bluetooth. There's likely also a way to get to Siri like on pretty much all Bluetooth headsets.

hurbledr 10y ago

This article neglected to mention the apps most often used while driving, map apps.

megablast 10y ago
I bet facebook would be number one.

perseusprime11 10y ago

I've seen so many drivers either texting or using their phones while driving and not paying attention to traffic signals, stop signs, and pedestrian crossings. I wish there was a way to stop smartphones from displaying notifications and other things that distract users.

bigethan 10y ago

As a cyclist in SF, Uber/Lyft drivers are the most dangerous thing going. They're driving by staring at their phone's map for directions and pickup/dropoff. Once they stop, they stare at their phone for the next ride. Very little situational awareness. It'd be nice if there was some sort of way for them to indicate they drive erratically. Perhaps by painting their cars all yellow or something...

edgyswingset 10y ago
My one and only experience using Uber was with a driver who had no clue where anything was, clearly wasn't from around the place, and from what I could tell violated two traffic laws. So what do I do, give him a bad rating? No, because this person probably needed the money, and a rating under 4.5 gets you shitcanned in an already rigged system. Quite the revolution indeed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wvenable 10y ago
  Isn't that the point of the rating system? I don't want to be killed by my next Uber ride because you feel bad rating them appropriately. I've never had a bad Uber experience but I have had some downright frightening cab rides and I'd love to be able to rate that.
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    Yes, except it's not really a fair system. A 4.5/5.0, to me, is an excellent score. That's an A- if it were a grade on a math test. Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked. How does that make sense? It isn't a system in which I can fairly and accurately vote someone's work.
    - hueving 10y ago
      Continuing the test analogy, I don't want to eat at a restaurant that got rated a B by the health department. There are many cases where not being good enough to get an A- means you aren't good enough to do it professionally. This is no different.

lettergram 10y ago

I don't know why this is bothering me... But does anyone know why the title wasn't: "largest spike in..." As opposed to "biggest spike in..."?

Hondor 10y ago
What's the difference? Biggest sounds more familiar to me. Maybe local cultures differ? For that matter, why would you ever need the word "large"? Doesn't "big" always have the same meaning?

Scoundreller 10y ago

The article fails to provide any statistics to show that apps are the cause. It just publishes a few case reports where apps were involved in an accident, and notes an uptick in traffic fatalities. I think apps have reduced my chance of causing a traffic death: My cognitive load for driving is much less than it used to be. I no longer need to scan my environment for street signs, store signs or exit signs. I never need to look at a physical map/notes. If I miss a turn/exit, I'll recover. I don't have to suddenly shift lanes because I'll be in the correct lane a kilometer or two before the actual exit. Confusing signs telling me which lane to use are a non-issue. I'll also drive fewer kilometers because of optimized routing. Sometimes it's more, but that's because I'll be diverting around congestion. I can also wait out the traffic and know exactly when to leave at a time that has fewer cars on the road. Music streaming apps mean I don't have to fumble through radio stations, or clunky physical media.

embiggen 10y ago
Polar Opposite of other parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12964329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12964329 Both purport situational awareness" to have vastly different consequences and effects.
- Scoundreller 10y ago
  In my locale, possibly for legal/insurance reasons, Uber drivers far too often keep their phones very low, and out of sight from other vehicles. Therefore, they have to keep looking far down. For Uber drivers, the app is like a slot machine: you have to keep checking/interacting with it, lest you miss your next fare. With a navapp in a personal car, if it says I need to take no action for the next 1/10/100km, I know I can focus on the vehicles around me instead of signs for roughly that time.

apsec112 10y ago

Headline: "Blame Apps" Evidence given in the article: - "Safety experts say" that it's true. The experts are not named or quoted. No evidence or reasoning is given to support the claim. - Highway fatalities are up this year. However, they're still significantly down from 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. Mobile has been booming for almost a decade - if we should "blame apps", why hasn't it been a concern before now? - One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness. - "Insurance companies are convinced", according to one Robert Gordon. Gordon is actually named and quoted. However, the quote again doesn't provide evidence or reasoning. Maybe it is actually true. I don't know. However, the evidence given is nowhere near strong enough to be convincing. There's also the issue that newspapers are direct competitors with the apps they're railing against (for ad dollars), and have been losing badly: http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newspaperadsdecline2.jpg http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newsp....

Plasticover 10y ago
"One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness." The Snapchat was taken by the passenger. They were even hinting at racing being a factor. It seems like a bad example all around. I am sure apps contribute to some road fatalities but this was clearly a case of a driver crashing because they were going 115 miles a fucking hour on a populated road.
hueving 10y ago
Standard NY times reporting quality. You have to take it with a grain of salt or be in a position where their editorial viewpoint aligns with yours enough for you to ignore these evidence requirements.
mck- 10y ago
Next decade, the NYT will run another story titled: "Biggest drop in traffic deaths in 60 years". Autonomous cars are around the corner and it's the only way to truly make a leap forward in terms of traffic safety. And people can spend even more time on their apps while commuting, uninterrupted by this soon-to-be-forgotten distraction called "manual driving". Incidentally wrote a blog about this today: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/safer-roads-and-cleaner-air-with-autonomous-fleets-91b5d879be68#.1m9yo6lm7 https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/safer-roads-and-cleaner...

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

Incredibly misleading title/premise. Should be titled: "Traffic deaths slightly spike, but remain lower than 2008 or any other year after 1956." It has increased slightly since 2011, but less than 10%. What we might be seeing is that vehicle deaths has plateaued. We kept seeing decreases because technology kept being introduced (e.g. seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, crumple zones, partial overlap resistance, safety cages, better safety testing, etc). That kind of slowed at the end of the 2000s and is now picking up again (e.g. automatic braking, lane keep assist, blind spot warning, cross traffic alert, backup cameras, full automation, etc). The whole article is trying to manufacture a story out of statistical noise. We'd need more data (more years) to even start to speculate on an actual increase in deaths.

pash 10y ago

The author neglected to mention that miles driven in the United States increased by a record 107.5 billion last year, up 3.5% [0]. Even at 2014's all-time low death rate of 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled [1], that increase in driving would lead us to expect 1,161 more deaths on the roads. There were actually 2,417 (7.4%) more deaths in 2015 than in 2014, so the increase in driving accounts for "only" 48% of the increase in deaths. What accounts for the rest? More notable than the increase in deaths is that the death rate increased from 1.08 per 100 million VMT to 1.12 (3.7%), only the second year-on-year increase in the death rate in the past two decades. The only other increase in the death rate occurred between 2011 and 2012, and the biggest decreases in the death rate over the past two decades occurred in 2007–8 and 2008–9. What was happening in those years? First the Great Recession, then an economic recovery. The years of the Great Recession were saw the steepest declines in miles driven in decades, and the last several years of economic recovery have seen the sharpest increases in driving (to an all-time high last year). The recession years were also the only years vehicle registrations fell in recent decades, and the number of licensed drivers flatlined for the first time since the previous recession in the early 2000s; licenses and registrations ticked up again during the recovery years, and were up strongly in 2014 [2]. So we saw the death rate fall as the recession hit and people drove less, fewer people got licensed to drive, and fewer vehicles were on the road. Then during the recovery we saw the only increases in the death rate in decades, as people started driving more and more new drivers got licensed and hit the roads. Here's a hypothesis: the death rate fell sharply during the recession because (a) fewer cars were on the road, making roads safer, and especially because (b) the cohort of drivers changed, shifting older, more experienced, and more cautious as fewer young people (who were hit hardest by the economic downtown, and who have the highest rate of death by car) could afford to drive. Then during the recovery those changes reversed and people began to die on the roads at a higher rate. Corollary: this article about apps causing driving deaths is mostly journalistic nonsense. 0. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/15dectvt/ http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/... 1. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx 2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2014/dv1c.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2014/d...

dmalvarado 10y ago

If one believes the premise, this is a situation where better voice control could literally save lives, as well as my sanity. "Text John" "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now" ...

_audakel 10y ago

Other side of the coin is that law makers who have held up self driving cars and govt not funding enough grants is to blame

itaysk 10y ago

Expected to see a nice big chart showing the spike. was disappointed so didn't read the article :\

pasta 10y ago

I'm not sure if it's apps alone. At least in The Netherlands I'm seeing multiple reasons for this (we are also seeing a spike in accidents): * Cars are too easy to drive. Drivers have no clue about speed and danger. This is especially true for trucks. You can steer tons with your finger, but you have no idea about the real powers going on. * Individualization: The 'fuck you' way of driving. * Social media.

Someone 10y ago
In the Netherlands, a possible cause also is cyclists using mobile phones in traffic. Bicycles apparently are too easy to drive with all that nice infrastructure.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

I drive three to four hours a day in Los Angeles a few times a week, mostly on the 405. The number of people I see looking down or down an to the right at their phones is staggering. Now I can call it from afar because there's a commonality to the lack of speed control and lane keeping. They meander left-right on the lane, don't maintain speed and break abruptly as they look at traffic and have to re-synchronize with it. So, yeah, I don't know if I'd blame apps in particular but the advent of "smart" phones is definitely having an impact on our highways and, from what I see often enough, it isn't positive.

gog 10y ago

This link takes me to the login page.

maartendb 10y ago

You'll probably can't prevent this. That's why cars should be self-driving asap and common safety features like autonomous emergency braking, lane assist have to be mandatory in the meantime.

S_A_P 10y ago

With cars being built to safety standards that make cars from even 1-2decades ago seem like tin cans, - spike in traffic deaths as I see it is likely due to: 1) distracted driving/apps 2) increase in prescription pill usage/drunk driving. I don't think it's #2 at all. I don't need statistics to tell me that I am on of few drivers that puts my telephone in my pocket/center console so that I don't look at it. I will cop to hands free telephone talking and I admit it makes me a worse driver, but at least I have my eyes on the road. Bad journalism or not this is a real, infuriating, DANGEROUS, and completely preventable problem. I also can't believe how many people don't want to hear that they are doing something that makes them much more dangerous and much more likely to have an accident. I guess people just don't "feel" like it's wrong if they're sober. I am hoping that autonous cars are cheap and safe before my 9 year old starts driving. People don't seem capable in general of choosing either texting or driving and not both.

vermontdevil 10y ago

No mention of lower gas prices which means more driving ? I'll be curious to see if this had a bigger impact than apps.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

cmdrfred 10y ago

This appears to be a false premise, traffic deaths per miles driven shows a rather steady decline according to wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths...

london888 10y ago

I wonder if mobile phones have been responsible for more deaths or more lives saved over the past 10 years, and how you could attempt to calculate it.

rubidium 10y ago
Sounds like a good PhD project.

emodendroket 10y ago

Every time I ride a taxi or something I'm stunned by how many drivers I see futzing around with their phones. I don't find it hard to believe. > When distracted driving entered the national consciousness a decade ago, the problem was mainly people who made calls or sent texts from their cellphones. The solution then was to introduce new technologies to keep drivers’ hands on the wheel. Which by the way don't help

painted 10y ago

what about the increasingly number of auto-vehicles? how about the increase in the speeds people travel at? how about the materials the cars are made nowadays compared to 50 years ago?

nommm-nommm 10y ago
The materials cars are made of today vs 50 years ago are much safer.

tdkl 10y ago

I think someone wants to sell some more hands free solutions before the holiday season, so lets use some bogus "evidence" to make choices easier. Oh look, it just may happen that some tech companies are offering some that aren't selling well !

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