Comments on: Mobiles and car crashes: if there’s a link why don’t crashes go up when phone usage does?

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:33:50 +0000

Patrick – are cars getting safer at 9.00 pm each night?

As an ‘admitted user’ – a confessed user no less – you might be right on your road rage hypothesis, you can always let off steam to the person you’re talking to, rather than the driver who’s the source of your road rage.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:28:57 +0000

Obvious uncontrollable explanation no 1: cars getting safer at a similar rate to mobiles proliferating.

Non-obvious uncontrollable explanation no 1: talking to someone on a phone reduces one’s inclination and susceptibility to angry responses to other drivers. Maybe as an admitted user NG can comment on that.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:00:33 +0000

Well on my skim of the article it checked a whole lot of different ways of checking the phenomena it was investigating – for instance by looking to see if prohibiting mobile phone use in cars reduced accidents. I don’t think phone use in cars is price inelastic – mine isn’t. I often make calls in cars – and delay making them when I’m at my desk – so that I can catch up with people – either for business or pleasure when I’m in the car.

By: James Farrell

James Farrell — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:45:57 +0000

I didn’t go past the abstract, but on that basis the result is completely unsurprising. The rise in calls in the study period is attributed explicitly to the price change. But in the category of calls people make from cars, i.e. urgent ones, the demand is sure to be price inelastic. This is so obvious, however, that I’m sure the study must have addressed it somehow.

By: Gummo Trotsky

Gummo Trotsky — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:40:12 +0000

Well first up, Nick, there’s no such animal as a “natural experiment”. In this case, although mobile phone sales went up, and mobile phone usage went up, a lot of other variables were left uncontrolled (and don’t seem to have been examined, but I’m only four pages in).

Let’s posit an alternative “experiment” – run a statistical study on car crash rates, correlating them with discount wine sales offers. By the sort of reasoning the paper’s authors applied to mobile phones, we’d expect that when stores are flogging booze cheap, there should be an increase in such accidents, non?

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:04:16 +0000

Well Gummo, it seems to be a fairly serious study – full of additional checks of the basic finding.

And if you follow the link to the first comment, it looks like we were linked to by a bot – Pretty odd!

By: Gummo Trotsky

Gummo Trotsky — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:01:47 +0000

It should be noted, however, that our result is not inconsistent with the claim that cell phones are a source of attentional distraction. One possible explanation [for the result] is that drivers compensate for the dangers of cell phone use by driving more carefully. This argument is similar to one articulated by Peltzman in his consideration of the effects of seat belt use (1975).

Similarly, drunks compensate for the dangers of driving under the influence by driving more carefully – but they still manage to have more “accidents” than sober people.

Enough already – is this another one of those research papers that ended up on an institute web-site after it got knocked back by the academic journals?

By: cars » Mobiles and car crashes: if theres a link why dont crashes go…

cars » Mobiles and car crashes: if theres a link why dont crashes go… — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:59:45 +0000

[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIntuitively I find that using a hand held in a car is distracting at least when Im dialling. Its all in the paper from the looks of it… [...]