Relative Risks of Cellphone Usage -- to small child

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Murray <jxm900 () gmail com>
Date: August 28, 2006 12:47:00 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: [IP] Relative Risks of Cellphone Usage

> Begin forwarded message:
> From: Marc Aniballi <marc () zenture biz>
>
> I wonder if anyone on IP has any information on the relative risk
> posed by mobile phones versus radios, in-car GPS, and even unruly
> children or any sort of irate passenger?

Yes indeed!  Some colleagues and I conducted a study several years
ago, which examined precisely this topic, in particular the unruly
child issue.  One of the key questions we sought to answer was the
relative risk of various in-vehicle distractions.  We used various
sets of official accident records as the source data of our analyses.

As Marc surmises, the accident risk of having a small child in a
vehicle appears to be far greater that any other form of driver
distraction.  This seems to be the case for both fatal and non-fatal
accidents.  One of the main observations is that drivers usually make
a deliberate choice whether to deal with a phone call or not, whereas
a distraction from a small child is generally an "unmaskable" event,
so to speak.

We published our findings in IJVD; here's the full citation:

Murray, J., Ayres, T., Wood, C., and Humphrey, D. (2001).  Mobile
communications, driver distraction and vehicle accidents.
International Journal of Vehicle Design, 26 (1), 70-84.

If anyone wants a copy of the paper, please let me know.

It would be interesting to carry out a more comprehensive study using
more recent data, but we haven't yet found the time to do that.

Regards,

John Murray PhD
SRI International
Menlo Park, CA


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