Centennial, Colorado, 12 pm
David Watkins absorbs Philip Cohen’s recent findings debunking a killer-text epidemic:
Driving, of course, is what’s deadly here, and texting-while-driving, like anything that takes your focus away from such a dangerous, high-stakes activity, is obviously a terrible idea, the effort to focus on this one distracting activity misdiagnoses the fundamental problem …. [I]f we’re serious about continuing to push the fatality figures down, the most important thing we can do is make the kind of transit investments and change the regulatory environment to encourage the construction and development of neighborhoods and cities that facilitate low-car lifestyles. (To mount a hobby-horse of mine, down with parking requirements!) The good news is the kids want it, if we’ll let them have it.
On that note, Emily Badger looks into why young people are driving less:
It’s true that the recession has probably dampened car use, not just for millennials but for everyone. But there are also some relevant, long-term socioeconomic shifts underway that will likely continue to affect car use even after the economy fully recovers. As student loan debts rise, alongside the cost of housing in many big cities, budgets for car payments will be squeezed. This is particularly true in cities like Washington, D.C., where the high cost of housing is partly subsidized by the low cost of transportation for young professionals who rely on transit and bikes instead of cars.
Americans are also forming their own households, getting married and having children later – all trends that predate the recession and that postpone life stages associated with the peak driving years. … And one more economic argument: Americans just reaching driving age today “have no living memory of consistently cheap gasoline,” the PIRG and Frontier Group authors write. And they’re not likely to see it again in the near future, regardless of what the economy does.
A reader chimes in:
There has been something bothering me about Philip Cohen’s piece since and just put my finger on it (I’m sure Dish readers well versed in statistics have already seen this and pointed to it.) Cohen’s work comparing driving deaths and cell phone subscriptions doesn’t link anything, so it is not a surprise he ends up with a scattershot chart. It is funny that the work is about statistical truth while his chart his full of assumption. The chart assumes that owning a cell phone equals texting while driving.
But. This discounts all the people who have cell phones that don’t drive, can’t drive or don’t text while driving. My 93-year-old grandmother owns a cellphone – doesn’t drive. My 72-year-old father has a cell phone and wouldn’t know how to turn it on while driving, much less text while driving. My 9-year-old niece has a child safety cellphone – so she can’t text nor drive. And I never text while driving.
So while we own a cellphone (and thus are on the chart) we can’t die while texting. So you can’t know from us if texting equals fatalities. Our existence only proves we have not yet died while owning a cellphone.
I’m sure if we any kind of ownership study of widely used goods there would be the same scattergun chart. But I bet if we did “fedora hat” purchases by state suddenly death rates in certain retirement states suddenly cluster. Will owning a fedora cause fatal car crashes? No, but being an older man – the demographic likely to buy a fedora – would be the problem.
What needs to be examined is what people are actually doing when they have a fatal crash (drinking, drugs, eating, conversing, texting, watching a movie, on wifi, etc) and who knows where (or if) you can pull those statistics. Owning something is different from using something which is different from causing something.
The Dish 