4 out of 5 Dentists Surveyed

Hey, can we call this Indian Summer still?  I’m not sure of the origins of the term, but we are having a string of truly wonderful days to enjoy.  I look fondly on the term and I hope it isn’t in the “offensive” bucket these days.

Do you remember those toothpaste advertisements where the company backups the quality of the product by stating “4 out of 5 dentists surveyed”?  They never say where they got their pool of dentists did they?  Statistics are a funny thing, you can make them say just about anything you want really.

The Highway Loss Data Institute recently released a wild sounding report titled Texting bans don’t reduce crashes; effects are slight crash increases.  The media went into a feeding frenzy with this controversial nugget immediately producing news reports like this.

Well now, there you go.  Enough said, lets text our heads off, that was just a silly law to pass.  Hey, lets fire up them cell phones again and get back to yakking behind the wheel too. 

That’s pretty much how people (especially those who are dying to keep their conversation going in the fast lane) are seeing it.  They watch that news article and that’s enough.  Now most of the “journalists” mention something vague like “The Government objects to the findings in the report”. 

Heh, well, “The Governments” response comes in the form of Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood who blows the report out of the water.  The article at that link is worth reading, but at the risk of being yet another person who boils down someone elses information I’ll give you my favorite highlights. 

“Distracted driving-related crashes killed nearly 5,500 people in 2009 and injured almost half a million more.”  The source of those numbers aren’t ambiguous or derived as statistics.  In fact, those numbers are a different type of figure called metrics. 

Now, as a person who deals daily with the gathering and presenting of metrics I think I can say that the difference between metrics and statistics is night and day.  Metrics is a total count of things or if you prefer, a sum of events.  Statistics is deriving a conclusion based on a sampling. 

Before I anger all my statistic savvy friends out there, I’m not dismissing statistics.  In fact statistics is a fascinating science that we use on a daily basis to make huge decisions that do lots of good stuff.  The problem is that by their nature they lend themselves to misuse by those who can take the results produced and word smith the interpretation.  Metrics are less subject to interpretation.

Ok, /nerd_off. 

So, back to our friend Ray Lahood.  Ray makes another great point in his report.  A point that made me stand up and cheer.  He discusses a study by the DOT of pilot enforcement campaigns in Harford, Connecticut and Syracuse. New York from April 2010.  They tested to see if increased enforcement and public service announcements could reduce the number of folks using their phone while driving.

Wow, who-da-thunk-it.  It works!  Gee, so what were saying here is that passing laws isn’t enough to stop people from talking/texting while driving?  Oh, you have to write them tickets and make it painful to get them to stop?  What a revelation.

Anyone who spends any time on the road and has a small measure of common sense could have answered all these questions.  People who talk on their cell phones (text, read a map, do their makeup etc) do dangerous stuff while driving and cause accidents.  After the recent hands free law went into effect, people put their phones down for a week (hmm, about the same length of time that police focused on enforcing the law) and then picked them right back up again.

I’m glad Ray is willing to go on the record with it, really I am.  I’m glad he called out that it isn’t enough to pass laws but that we need to enforce them. 

To me though this whole thing is another clear sign post on the highway of modern life.  We have a mess of people running around doing things that make their life easier regardless of the cost to those around them.  That cost starts with annoyance, moves to property damage, then injury and finally loss of life.  We get a burst of public outrage and pass some laws thinking that will solve the problem.  Everyone pats each other on the back on a job well done and the truth gets swallowed up in spin while the media machine generates lots of advertising revenue.

In the end, I’m still getting cut off by the Soccer Mom on the phone with Janet sharing her tofu smoothy recipe.  The pattern repeats itself in so many places.  Look at how many issues go round and round and the only result is the media outlets get more time to tell us that “Bob is Living Large”.  When will we have had our fill?

The most powerful tools we have today are our wallets and our remote controls.  I still mark my ballot when it comes out but I’m backing it up with Fast Forward, Channel Up, Power Off and wallet closed. 

Don’t drive angry, drive weird!