Driving with cell phones

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by Moonliner

Yesterday the NTSB recommended an outright ban on cell phones in cars (including hands free).

Sure a ban would save lives but so would dropping the national speed limit to 10mph. It makes me wonder, what is an acceptable level of risk?

Americans take 1,100,000,000 car trips per day. That's 1.1 Billion trips every day

In 2008 448,000 people were injured and 5,474 people were killed by distracted driving.

That means that on any given day, your chances of being injured by a distracted driving is 0.000001%. Literately one on a million and I'd guess that number drops dramatically if you are not the one doing the distracted driving.

Your chance of being killed is 0.00000001% or 1 in 100 Million

Those are pretty slim odds.

Is everyone on a cell phone in those 1.1 billion car trips? If not, what if they were? I imagine the odds would go up. There are close to 300 million people in the United States. If everybody fired four random gunshots out their window or on the street every day, you'd have about 1.1 billion shots fired every day, the overhelming majority of which would not kill anybody, but, in real numbers, a lot would.

Given that for years, people drove without talking on the phone, the inescapable conclusion is that every single cell phone conversation that occurs in a car is unnecessary. It is, perhaps, a preference, and, like firing gunshots in public, an expression of the cherished freedom to threaten our neighbors, but banning it wouldn't bother me.

I would also add re the statistics that some other driver usually makes me go, "Hey, what the f***!" at least once a week, and that driver is usually on the phone.