Deaths From Distracted Driving...Down?

[Jgrooms]

Traffic deaths spiked in 2016, including pedestrians killed - PBS NewsHour
https://apple.news/ACLrTBZw1QFuXVlb2p4-fnAhttps://apple.news/ACLrTBZw1QFuXVlb2p4-fv

I’ve seen this from a number of media outlets in last few days.

I fail to see how the causes of ‘accidents’ from distracted driving could be down. It flys in the face of everything we see daily & frankly sheer common sense.

Pedestrians up.
Motorcycles up.
Cyclists up.

All the most vulnerable. Ask someone in LE what they think about cell phone use and accidents.


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[ORMojo]

Your Apple News link isn't working for me, and I don't have the time right now to track the story down.

I am very skeptical that auto-related fatalities and serious injuries related to distracted driving are down. I don't have the study at hand, but I know, having just sat in one of their presentations this past week, that the Oregon Department of Transportation believes the opposite - that not only have fatalities and serious injuries significantly increased in the past several years, but that distracted driving is a major contributor to that.

One problem is that it is often difficult to establish distracted driving as a contributor to a crash. But, two things - ODOT has seen an increase in Oregon in cases where distracted driving is established as a contributing cause, and, ODOT has seen a significant increase in "lane departure" crashes, which, ODOT and the independent study authors believe, are highly correlated with distracted driving.

[Exonerv]

Active link:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/traffic-deaths-spiked-2016-including-pedestrians-killed/

[Peter P.]

The article does not say HOW MUCH "Deaths related to distracted and drowsy driving declined". It may not be statistically significant. Also, one year's decline does not plot a trend.

[Jgrooms]

Active link:



http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/traffic-deaths-spiked-2016-including-pedestrians-killed/



Thanks

If you pay any attn to your local news you’ll see many of these “lane departure” incidents.

Also, the neighborhood ones where someone ends up w car in some part of a house. Out of curiosity I’ve been pulling up the sat view & those are often at a bend in the road. Simple correction when you are actually looking up.

Anyway, not sure why I’m beating the dead horse, I just find it odd as hell the stats say we have a 3 yr trend up in fatalities (out pacing the mile driven increase) yet they show less DD.

My guess, again knowing LE, is people are not admitting it, and officers are not checking the devices for it.

Its going to be harder to legislate for it if the stats aren’t there.


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[nooneline]

The article does not say HOW MUCH "Deaths related to distracted and drowsy driving declined". It may not be statistically significant. Also, one year's decline does not plot a trend.

Yeah - this is really important.

Statistical significance isn't really important here - that only comes into play when you're sampling data, not when you're observing rates.

The important thing here is that one year's decline might be part of an overall trend of rising. Something that's rising doesn't necessarily rise every single year, but rather, goes two steps forward, one step back - and so on.

Essentially, to an epidemiologist, simply looking at data from one year to the next doesn't tell you much.