Comment Re:Easy stats to pull (Score 1) 367
Because the National Safety Counsel produces conclusions that do not match their own data.
What the National Safety Council actually says is that there is no trustworthy data available, so they extrapolate from the data they have and predictions based on driver performance studies.
Motor vehicle crashes involving cellphones are "vastly underreported" in national statistics on fatal automobile crashes, according to a new study by the National Safety Council.
Researchers for the Itasca, Ill., -based non-profit organization reviewed 180 fatal crashes from 2009 to 2011 that resulted in one or more deaths. It independently confirmed that those crashes were cellphone-related through means such as the driver admitting it, a caller or texter on the other end during the crash reporting cellphone use, a passenger reporting the driver's cellphone use or police finding an unfinished message on the phone at the crash site.
The NSC pored through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the national database of fatal motor vehicle crashes and their causes to see how the government had classified those 180 fatal crashes. The council found that, in 2011, the government database had identified 52% of the crashes as cellphone-related. In 2010, it was 35%, and in 2009, 8%.
Even in fatal crashes where the driver admitted using a cellphone, only 50% of those crashes in 2011 were coded in FARS data as involving a cellphone, NSC said.