Readers will know that I recently upgraded from a cheap Walmart burner cellphone to a Motorola Z. Quite the leap in technology and I love it. Where I live, there is no cell service so I have had little need for a phone (hence the cheap one) but now that I am spending more time on the road, a better phone was called for.
Here is a cautionairy tale though - from Bloomberg:
Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting
Jennifer Smith doesn’t like the term “accident.” It implies too much chance and too little culpability.
A “crash” killed her mother in 2008, she insists, when her car was broadsided by another vehicle while on her way to pick up cat food. The other driver, a 20-year-old college student, ran a red light while talking on his mobile phone, a distraction that he immediately admitted and cited as the catalyst of the fatal event.
“He was remorseful,” Smith, now 43, said. “He never changed his story.”
Yet in federal records, the death isn’t attributed to distraction or mobile-phone use. It’s just another line item on the grim annual toll taken by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration [NHTSA]—one of 37,262 that year. Three months later, Smith quit her job as a realtor and formed Stopdistractions.org, a nonprofit lobbying and support group. Her intent was to make the tragic loss of her mother an anomaly.
And some numbers:
Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.
And this one:
Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians—all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than, say, a 4,000-pound SUV—especially if you’re glancing up from your phone rather than concentrating on the road. Last year, 5,987 pedestrians were killed by cars in the U.S., almost 1,100 more than in 2014—that’s a 22 percent increase in just two years.
More at the site - my truck allows for hands-free calling and I would never browse while driving. I am not stupid. I see it all the time though when out on the road.
One other cause for the increase in fatalities that was not mentioned was the CAFE Standards - the easiest way for a manufacturer to make a vehicle more fuel efficient is to cut its weight. This makes the car or truck lighter and less strong. For more on that story: Here, here and here - a lot more at Google if you look.
