Are touchscreens in cars dangerous?

Your fear seems to be unfounded if we can extrapolate data for Turkey: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-drivers-pa...

15k drivers and passengers dead for 3k pedestrians; 1.3M injured drivers/passengers for 170k pedestrians.

The only figure that supports your fear is that out of all injuries, 1.8% pedestrians die, whereas it's "only" 1.2% for those "encased in a machine".

But absolute numbers tell a different, more important story: ratio of deaths is 1:5, and 1:7.5 for injuries (meaning, they much less likely to be in a traffic accident).

Imagine if MMA fights had a death risk (for fighters) of X%, but watching the fight on your TV (or just seeing it for a second while scrolling through channels) was 20% as likely to kill you as being in the actual fight.

Wouldn't you say it's fair to worry about risks to the non-participants, since they didn't ask or choose to get this additional risk into their lives?

You can stretch this even further, but only if you can give me a number of pedestrians who have never used a road vehicle (public transport included), or had a motorised delivery to their home or office. (This is analogous to watching an MMA match but never partaking, right?)

Oh, roads are useful for them too?

All the drivers/passengers are pedestrians too, and very close to all pedestrians are drivers or passengers on the very same roads.

This is about a moment of time and their active mode of transportation.

(The closest one gets is by using subway strictly, which requires a significantly more expensive underground infrastructure)

Your data doesn't prove anything in this context. While traffic accidents involving pedestrians will involve two parties (the pedestrian and the motorist), a motor vehicle may involve just the motorist. It also fails to normalize the data in a meaningful context. There are many areas where people would either be foolhardy to walk, or it is outright illegal to walk. That forces people to spend more time in a vehicle (so the absolute numbers are meaningless). Places where pedestrians do not go tend to have higher speed traffic (increasing the risk to motorists).

For your numbers to be meaningful, you need to compare like to like. To say that pedestrians are less likely to be in a traffic accident you need to compare hours driving to hours walking in areas with traffic. Fatality rates are more of a judgement call. Distracted driving on a highway is going to increase the fatality rate for motorists (higher speeds) while having little impact on pedestrians (the ratio of motorists to pedestrians is much higher). Distracted driving on urban streets is going to decrease the fatality rate for motorists (lower speeds), while it almost certainly represents the fatality rate for pedestrians as you presented it. Ignoring the environment is valid if you are only concerned about the impact on other motorists. Considering the environment is important if you want to make meaninful comparisons to pedestrian fatalities (or injuries).

I feel like this is blurring the lines a bit too much. The analogy in my metaphor would be that you're conflating "anyone who's stepped foot in a gym" (pedestrian/public transport users who might have ordered from Amazon a couple of times this year) with the "people who get in the octagon daily" (car drivers).

I know we're several levels of nesting deep at this point, but we were not talking about the general usefulness of roads ; we were comparing the asymmetric impact of making cars safer for the people in the car vs for other people involved (eg bikes or pedestrians).

> All the drivers/passengers are pedestrians too

This is too wild a generalization, as you could compare either the amount of "miles traveled" or "time spent" and see that there most likely is a vast gulf between:

- People who mostly do everything by car (eg the vast majority of all Americans I've met, but also true in many places including Caribbean islands with no/bad public transport)

- People who almost do nothing by car (eg the vast majority of people I've met inside the walls of Paris, although Uber has surely changed the ratio)

It feels like you're taking a group of people who might drive or be in a car 2 hours+ per day and walk a total of 150 steps to/from their car, vs. another group of people who might walk 8,000+ steps along streets/roads a day and get a cab to the airport once a quarter... and saying they're basically the same.

If one wants to dig deeper, that's surely welcome: it's not me bundling these people groups together, it's different research authors (and you).

The discussion was on safety of touchscreens in cars, and you brought the claim that pedestrians are more at risk, which I countered with some statistical data from one study.

By contextualizing the data without supporting it with evidence, you are driving your unfounded point. For example, I can argue touchscreens are used much less on roads with pedestrians, since you tune your AC/music/navigation... more often on long motorway trips (I similarly have no basis for this claim other than personal gut feel).

The point is that more people who are injured or die in a traffic accident are not pedestrians: the "machine engineered for safety" does not protect them any better than pedestrians have it: if there are deaths due to touchscreen use, plausibly it's more drivers/passengers than pedestrians.

The entire thread is about risk of death/injury due to distracted driving due to touchscreens in cars, and who is more at risk: we don't have the numbers for this very specific context, but we can look at the whole picture and "interpolate".

I would argue that touchscreens see more use on motorways, and thus lead to more accidents than outside motorways (citation missing). This would mean we should be more or equally worried about other drivers and passengers who are at risk than about pedestrians.