Another Distracted Driving Study

Fatal Accident?
How do they know that the victim was daydreaming?

I had somebody argue with me that cell phone usage has resulted in a huge decrease in overall vehicular fatality rates since they allow for almost instant access to EMS.
Of course since I drive a lot in my job, and I have two motorcycles, I'm a hard sell on this concept. I drive too much for my beloved company and just about every week I see some unguided vehicle on the road with the driver poking a piece of gorilla glass instead of doing the stick and rudder thing.
In this very forum there are idiots who try to disable the VSS lockout on their dash mounted GPS units and others have even installed video monitors.
Yes.
I said idiots and I meant idiots.

Back when I was a kid, drunk driving was just starting to get to be a big deal. In my home town in Indiana, if you were caught driving with a bunch of your buds and a case of beer it was a real bummer. The LEO would make us pour out all of the beer and have the soberest person drive everybody home, and you'd best not give him (back then they were all hims) any lip or he would rat you out to the folks.

Then.....Moms got MADD!
Vehicular accidents involving alcohol stopped being a matter solely for civil courts, and the fines got stiffer. The Fed got involved and forced the states to lower the impairment level, and raise the drinking age. I don't like the Fed strong-arming the states with their own money (and neither does the SCOTUS! ) BUT I liked the outcome in this case.
Then?
Jail time….baby! SR-22. REAL suspensions.
Now?
People still drink and drive, because Darwin had a good point about Natural Selection.
Accident rates involving adult drunk drivers are either still plummeting or have about bottomed out to where they're going to stay until we start shooting first time offenders on the spot.

Distracted driving is going to continue to get to be a bigger and bigger problem until we reach a tipping point and start treating it like the crime that it should be. It's already happening in some locations, where LEO's or sniveling lawyers are pulling cell phone records or searching for VSS lockout mods in accidents....
Soon there will be mandatory investigations....including a looky-see into your vehicle's flight log to see where you were...how fast you were going...whether or not your seat belt was latched... etc.
Think not? Wanna bet?
Uncle Sam is in the health insurance biz now...so you'd better think again.
My beloved company already dissallows ANY electronic device in the cockpit, and if I break Goofy's nose in addition to the usual whizz-quiz and blood work, I get a GPS, cellular, and OBD2 looky-see and there's a microphone in many of our service trucks. The OBD2 is a specu-guess on my part, but there's a connection into this bus from my new 'Black-Box.'
I'm one of the blessed "non-cockpit voice recorcer" vehicles.
Reason: Insurance.
I can much more easily justify somebody getting drunk at a party and not realizing that they're too impaired to drive than I can explain why somebody is too selfish to pull over before trying to digitize thier thoughts or poke a new destination into a GPS unit.

Sorry Bob.
Rant out.

 

62% being "lost in thought" needs two subcategories:
1) Those who consider "lost in thought" a better answer than what they were really doing.
2) Those who don't remember what they were doing.

 

Just a thought: maybe the most dangerous time is when some new distraction enters the picture.

Our first car didn't have a radio at all, and when our kids brought a small portable radio along one time, I found it terrifically distracting for the first little while. I'm thinking with anything new, it overwhelms your awareness for a while, until you adapt.

Oh, and when our kids turn on that radio, the first song to come belting out was the famous stripper's theme song. We were sallying out of our apartment complex parking lot, totally cracking up.

 

Excellent point.
Today's distraction might be tomorrow's necessity.
Cars will probably be self driving by then, or at least have V2V and V2I interfaces that allow the 'driver' some notional illusion of being pilot-in-command.