texting
kkrisberg | April 10, 2015Today, nearly every state in the country has a law that bans texting while driving. But do these laws make a difference?
A group of researchers took on that question, comparing crash-related hospitalizations among states with a texting-while-driving ban and states without such a ban. And they found some encouraging results: Texting bans were associated with a 7 percent reduction in crash-related hospitalizations among all age groups, especially among those ages 22 to 64. To conduct the study, which was published in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers examined…
gregladen | July 2, 2014Earlier this week a dude driving a truck while texting meandered off the road and ran over a woman, killing her. More horrifically, she was on a bike towing a child trailer occupied by her two children, one and four years of age, so they got to watch their mom die. The man who apparently killed this woman, on a road in southern Minnesota, is Christopher Weber of Madison, South Dakota. Apparently he was texting. Assuming this happened as reported, we have here a case of someone being a complete moron and a lot of other people paying a terrible price. "A person who ... causes the death of…
lborkowski | September 19, 2012The New York Times has a terrific graphic that plots the number of auto fatalities per 100,000 people and the vehicle miles driven per capita from 1950 to 2011. Overall, we're driving far more vehicle-miles per capita and seeing far fewer auto deaths than we were six decades ago, but this hasn't happened in a linear fashion. Rather, as Hannah Fairfield explains, change occurs unevenly:
Plotting the two most important variables against each other — miles traveled versus deaths per 100,000 population — yields a pattern that looks like a plateau followed by a steep drop. It evokes the theory of…