Sci-Tech Information: NYC Cabs Could Get Black Box Technology To Deter Speeding
Despite the de Blasio administration's commitment to Vision Zero, there's been a surge of pedestrian fatalities so far in 2014, including a 9-year-old boy who was fatally struck by a cab driver on the Upper West Side in front of his father. That cabbie wasn't handed criminal charges and kept his license, which is more par for the course than anyone would like: only two taxi drivers out of 16 involved in fatal or serious crashes since 2009 have had their licenses revoked. But de Blasio had a plan to hold cabbies more accountable in the future: taxi black boxes.
According to AP, de Blasio wants to outfit cabs with "black-box-style data recorders and devices that would sound warnings--or even pause the fare meter--for going too fast." Paul Steely White, who runs Transportation Alternatives, told them that such a plan could influence drivers all over the city, because cabbies' driving "dictates behavioral norms to other drivers."
The Taxi and Limousine Commission says it is "still exploring the ideas," but it seems many cabbies are upset that de Blasio is singling them out for scrutiny, despite the fact that only approximately 4 percent of the roughly 200,000 vehicles involved in accidents citywide last year were yellow cabs.
This isn't a new idea: back in 2009, windshield-mounted cameras (under the model name MacBox III) were proposed. Those boxes were slightly different, designed to record data on vehicle use, road accidents and other information. "This technology is being used effectively throughout the for-hire vehicle industry, and it is saving them considerable amounts of money on their insurance costs," then-TLC chairman Matthew W. Daus said at the time. "More importantly, however, we believe this pilot program has very real potential to help us deter accidents and save lives."
That plan didn't come to fruition, and black boxes remain mostly in the realm of the theoretical right now: "It's unclear whether anyone has developed devices linking speed and fare meters, but experts say it's feasible," AP wrote.
Cellphone use doesn't increase the number of car accidents
Cops may still write you a ticket for yakking on a handheld phone while driving. But the link between cellphone use and accidents looks more tenuous if you agree with the conclusions of a recent study from Carnegie Mellon University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Using statistics and data comparisons, the researchers found that the increased use of cellphones has led to no measurable increase in accidents. Expect this study to be hotly contested. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the prevailing winds in Washington that would like to see more restrictions on phone use and texting, up to and including interlocks that keep anyone in the car from using their phone.
The study was published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Saurabh Bhargava, assistant professor of social and decision sciences in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Vikram S. Pathania of the London School of Economics and Political Science looked at cellular data from 2002 to 2005, apparently after the NSA was done parsing it. They identified drivers as those whose calls were regularly handed off from cell tower to cell tower. At the time, most carriers offered free calling after 9 pm. Bhargava and Pathania found motorists increased their calling by 7% at 9pm. They pulled up data on eight million car crashes in those four years as well as all fatal crashes. Their finding: no statistical link. Crashes didn't go up when calling went up.
As a bonus, they compared states that enacted handheld cellphone bans and found no difference in the crash rate before and after. There's a damning graphic in their study that compares cellphone ownership over 20 years vs. car crashes. Ownership is steadily up, crashes and fatal crashes are steadily down.
Are they on to something, or just blowing smoke?
It's easy to challenge the study, or at least to nibble around the edges. The mobile user data would include passengers as well as drivers. Cars are getting safer all the time and drunks are being policed off the roads more than in the past. Passing a hands-free law isn't the same as getting people to obey it. Texting may be more distracting than making a call, as the authors themselves note. And so forth. But still, the research should be kept in mind when the Department of Transportation and the states ponder their next steps.
"Using a cellphone while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined," says Bhargava. "While our findings may strike many as counterintuitive, our results are precise enough to statistically call into question the effects typically found in the academic literature. Our study differs from most prior work in that it leverages a naturally occurring experiment in a real-world context."
Statistical modeling of big data can be a powerful tool to prove something that would be difficult otherwise. One example: Are blacks and Hispanics on death row proportionally more than whites because they're inherently, ah, criminalistic? Work with a big data sets showing arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing for whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and similar crimes, and many researchers say the one variable that best explains the discrepancy is the defendant's color. Conservatives and traditionalists may not like statistics and deep research to prove a point. But Nate Silver didn't pick all 50 states right in the 2012 presidential election by flipping a quarter.
Cellphone-in-car opponents mostly rely on a 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It said cellphone use by drivers increased the risk of a crash fourfold, making it a safety hazard on par with driving drunk.
sources: [http://en.twwtn.com/Information/17_60383.html]
According to AP, de Blasio wants to outfit cabs with "black-box-style data recorders and devices that would sound warnings--or even pause the fare meter--for going too fast." Paul Steely White, who runs Transportation Alternatives, told them that such a plan could influence drivers all over the city, because cabbies' driving "dictates behavioral norms to other drivers."
The Taxi and Limousine Commission says it is "still exploring the ideas," but it seems many cabbies are upset that de Blasio is singling them out for scrutiny, despite the fact that only approximately 4 percent of the roughly 200,000 vehicles involved in accidents citywide last year were yellow cabs.
This isn't a new idea: back in 2009, windshield-mounted cameras (under the model name MacBox III) were proposed. Those boxes were slightly different, designed to record data on vehicle use, road accidents and other information. "This technology is being used effectively throughout the for-hire vehicle industry, and it is saving them considerable amounts of money on their insurance costs," then-TLC chairman Matthew W. Daus said at the time. "More importantly, however, we believe this pilot program has very real potential to help us deter accidents and save lives."
That plan didn't come to fruition, and black boxes remain mostly in the realm of the theoretical right now: "It's unclear whether anyone has developed devices linking speed and fare meters, but experts say it's feasible," AP wrote.
Cellphone use doesn't increase the number of car accidents
Cops may still write you a ticket for yakking on a handheld phone while driving. But the link between cellphone use and accidents looks more tenuous if you agree with the conclusions of a recent study from Carnegie Mellon University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Using statistics and data comparisons, the researchers found that the increased use of cellphones has led to no measurable increase in accidents. Expect this study to be hotly contested. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the prevailing winds in Washington that would like to see more restrictions on phone use and texting, up to and including interlocks that keep anyone in the car from using their phone.
The study was published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Saurabh Bhargava, assistant professor of social and decision sciences in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Vikram S. Pathania of the London School of Economics and Political Science looked at cellular data from 2002 to 2005, apparently after the NSA was done parsing it. They identified drivers as those whose calls were regularly handed off from cell tower to cell tower. At the time, most carriers offered free calling after 9 pm. Bhargava and Pathania found motorists increased their calling by 7% at 9pm. They pulled up data on eight million car crashes in those four years as well as all fatal crashes. Their finding: no statistical link. Crashes didn't go up when calling went up.
As a bonus, they compared states that enacted handheld cellphone bans and found no difference in the crash rate before and after. There's a damning graphic in their study that compares cellphone ownership over 20 years vs. car crashes. Ownership is steadily up, crashes and fatal crashes are steadily down.
Are they on to something, or just blowing smoke?
It's easy to challenge the study, or at least to nibble around the edges. The mobile user data would include passengers as well as drivers. Cars are getting safer all the time and drunks are being policed off the roads more than in the past. Passing a hands-free law isn't the same as getting people to obey it. Texting may be more distracting than making a call, as the authors themselves note. And so forth. But still, the research should be kept in mind when the Department of Transportation and the states ponder their next steps.
"Using a cellphone while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined," says Bhargava. "While our findings may strike many as counterintuitive, our results are precise enough to statistically call into question the effects typically found in the academic literature. Our study differs from most prior work in that it leverages a naturally occurring experiment in a real-world context."
Statistical modeling of big data can be a powerful tool to prove something that would be difficult otherwise. One example: Are blacks and Hispanics on death row proportionally more than whites because they're inherently, ah, criminalistic? Work with a big data sets showing arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing for whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and similar crimes, and many researchers say the one variable that best explains the discrepancy is the defendant's color. Conservatives and traditionalists may not like statistics and deep research to prove a point. But Nate Silver didn't pick all 50 states right in the 2012 presidential election by flipping a quarter.
Cellphone-in-car opponents mostly rely on a 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It said cellphone use by drivers increased the risk of a crash fourfold, making it a safety hazard on par with driving drunk.
sources: [http://en.twwtn.com/Information/17_60383.html]
