A father-daughter exchange, from Lisa the Skeptic:

Lisa: Excuse me, I took a piece of this skeleton for scientific analysis. Soon you will have all the facts.

Homer: Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Craig Friebolin:

Fatal Crashes vs. Cell Phone Subscribers from 1994 to 2008

Total Crashes: 0.9% Decrease
Fatal Crashes: 6.2% Decrease
Cellphone use: 1,262.4% Increase

Decius:

See also - why cellphones don't cause brain cancer.

Friebolin's two data points are misleading in the way they underplay the story on the use of mobile devices.

1. The US population has increased from 1994 to 2008, from 263M to 304M.

2. There are more vehicles per capita on the road in 2008 than in 1994.

3. Total miles driven increased substantially from 1994 to 2008. At a glance, it looks like roughly a 25% increase.

4. Average commute times are rising even faster than total miles driven. In Atlanta, the average commute time is 127 minutes per round trip.

5. The automobile accident rate has declined steadily since the 1920s. (Friebolin's "0.9% decrease" is actually quite misleading because it compares total counts rather than rates. See below ...)

6. Although the absolute number of subscribers has increased (as shown above), per-subscriber activity levels have risen at a vastly greater rate. You'll find growth from 44B MOU in 1996 to 1.68T in 2008 and 2.25T in 2011, according to CTIA. Likewise, texting has gone from negligible levels in 1994, to 33M in 2001, to nearly 200B in 2011. Read those numbers again. That's a 51x increase in voice MOUs from 1994-2011, and a 6000x increase in texts just in the last ten years.

Of course, none of t... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

noteworthy wrote:
Advocates of a ban are clearly cherry-picking examples, but deflating those bad examples (alone) doesn't disprove the hypothesis that a ban would improve safety.

I know its an oversimplification. Call me busted. However, I maintain that if using a cellphone while driving was as dangerous as driving while legally intoxicated, a claim made with a straight face by these advocates, than given the explosion in cellphone use we'd be drowning in the blood from cellphone related accidents. Seriously imagine if there was a 1000% increase nationwide in the volume of drunk driving.

Advocates and critics are talking past each other. Critics say "it's not worth it" while advocates say, "it couldn't hurt."

Actually, it does hurt. It stops me from communicating with people when I need to communicate and it stops me from getting information about road conditions and traffic when I need that information.

I probably use a cellphone while driving at least once a week. If its going to become a crime, I want a clear justification, and not a bunch of sensationalistic examples and finger wagging from people who don't like "morons talking on their cellphones" and are incapable of grasping the fact that stupid things that idiots do with new technologies aren't necessarily different from the stupid things that those idiots used to do when they didn't have those new technologies.

But it's hard to know whether a total ban in 2008 would have led to a rate of 1.13 in 2009. Would that have been worth it? If it had dropped to 1.00 in 2009, meaning that the ban had doubled the year-over-year safety improvement, would that have been worth it?

Its not clear to me that criminalizing specific uses of cellphones is more effective than educating people in general about distracted driving.

Its not clear to me that the use of cellphones is dangerous is every circumstance and so the correct approach is to ban it in all circumstances instead of specifically addressing the circumstances in which it is a problem. Its not clear to me what rationalization justifies the criminalization of the use of cellphones in vehicles that are not moving, which the Georgia law does, and I suspect many other states also do.

We now have laws banning cellphones and texting. There ought to be data demonstrating that they are working. AFAIK the data demonstrates the opposite. So its all cost and no benefit. And its not just about lack of enforcement - AFAIK the data shows that there is no benefit even when large percentages of the population are complying with the law.

The fact that advocates do not seem to care whether or not the law has an actual benefit speaks volumes regarding their motivations.

The whole business seems an authoritarian impulse that is not genuinely driven by a desire to save lives so much as a desire to legislate people's road rage as if once the cellphone ban is complete we'll all be able to breath easier with the roads completely clear of those "idiots" who don't pay attention to their driving and teenagers who get in car accidents.

I would prefer that people not build their fantasy land upon my back.