Car Accidents & Cell Phones

1. Car Accidents & Cell Phones By: Hongtao Xu Sasha Hochstadt Logan McLeod Heather Samoville Christian Helland Meng Yu

2. Objective • Why? • Recent Legislation • Is it Valid? Justifiable? • What? • To determine a possible correlation between traffic fatalities and cell-phone users • How? • Collect data of traffic fatalities and cell-phone subscription • Setup valid model and find relationship between them

3. Initial Hypothesis • Traffic accidents are increasing over time • After the introduction of cell phones traffic accidents will increase at a higher rate

4. Gathered Data • Estimated # of Cell Phone Subscribers1985-2002 • Traffic Fatalities1966-2000 • # of Registered Vehicles1966-2000 • # of Licensed drivers1966-2000 • Resident Population 1966-2000 • Fatality Rate per 100k Registered Vehicles 1966-2000

7. Modified Hypothesis • Findings: • Fatalities from car accidents are actually decreasing over time • Cell phone subscribers are increasing exponentially over time • As fatalities continue to decrease over time, the introduction cell phones will cause them to decrease at a slower rate • In order to show this we must compare the periods before and after cell phone use

8. Fatalities as a Function in % Change of Cell Phone Subscribers After Cell Phone Use LN(Fatalities) Before Cell Phone Use Error Year

9. Annual Motor Vehicle Fatalities per Registered Vehicles Before Cell Phone After Cell Phone

10. Regression Results in time series LN(FATALITY) = 75.5532 - 0.0364069*YEAR LN(FATALITY) = 53.4660 - 0.0252678*YEAR Before Cell Phone After Cell Phone

11. Quantifying the Cell Phone Effect • Extrapolate pre-cell phone regression into cell phone regression • Calculate expected # of fatalities and % difference from actual • Find relationship between % error and # of cell phone subscribers

12. Region of Dramatic Deviation from Expected Values.

14. Results FATALITY = -1.309 + 0.08443*LOG(CELLPHONE)

15. Results

16. Conclusions • A strong correlation between cell phone subscriptions & fatality rate exists. • Our model exhibits a logarithmic relationship. • We estimate that since 1991, cell phones have caused more than 40,000 deaths.

17. Questions?