Silk wrote: I realise I may not have addressed all of your points in the manner you expected and I can be a little argumentative, but the accusation of trolling seems a bit strong.
No matter, I've been called called worse.
Alright, I'll carry on playing along
Silk wrote:jameslb101 wrote:Silk wrote:If mobile phones were as dangerous as we're told, we would expect to see a massive and very obvious increase in road casualties. The reality is, road deaths have actually fallen over the last 20 years. At least in the UK.
Serious question, as this is the third time you've used this argument, but do you understand the difference between a correlation and a causal link? Or are you choosing to ignore this to suit your (flawed) argument?
I've simply phrased it differently in reply to different people. As I haven't been counting, I'll take your word for it that it's three times.
So far, I haven't really had a satisfactory answer to the question as to why we haven't seen an exponential increase in mobile phone related crashes to match the exponential rise in mobile phone ownership. Believe me, if we had, we wouldn't need any statistical mumbo-jumbo to see it.
Well, I tried one or two explanations. I'll list some here, in detail, you knock 'em down one by one:
1. Non-injury, damage only, accidents; do claimants 'shop themselves' to their insurer? If not, how else would these crashes be 'found out' as phone-related?
2. Police-investigated; I'd guess - and I'm happy for any forum trafpols to detail procedures - that phones and phone records are only examined in the worst cases. And there have definately been reported cases of those types of crashes. So if many/most of the drivers causing these crashes aren't found out, then that fact won't make it into STATS19, which is the form used by police when summarising contributary factors, and so into the UK accident stats.
3. Mobile phones have been available to the masses (ie not the old 'car phones'), and even then with almost ubiquitous ownership, for a few years (like I pointed out, exactly 20 years for SMS txt this week). However - and this is a major point - drivers (well, the majority) aren't ALL useing their phones while driving, and those that do rarely (I presume) use their phone constantly whilst driving. So you're seeing a sub-set of drivers using phones some of the time. But . . . why shouldn't phone-involved crashes be increasing at a similar rate to phone ownership amongst those drivers who are [more] likely to be crash-involved?
4. What leads you to believe their hasn't been an exponential increase? What are you basing that belief on that would provide a true, factual account of how such crashes are increasong (or otherwise)?
5. Why 'exponential'? Wouldn't it be more likely, as I suggested in '3' that the rate would be linked more closely (correlation, though, not cause) to phone ownership amongst 'riskier' drivers?
PS Why do you mistrust a link between research and real-World?
Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:23 pm
