Did The BlackBerry Outage Save Lives In the UAE And Elsewhere?

The “War On Distracted Driving”, like most of the other wars in which the United States has participated in the past forty years, appears to be a rather muddled way of addressing an improperly defined problem. For the Ray LaHoods of the world, it has to be absolutely maddening that the “epidemic” of distracted driving has yet to lead to any sort of measurable decrease in road safety.

For them, I have some good news. While the plural of “anecdote” is never “data”, it would appear that a BlackBerry outage may have gained a crucial hill in the “War On Distracted Driving”. The problem: as usual, the hill is overseas somewhere.

The Arabian online paper The National reported over the weekend that, during last week’s European and Middle Eastern BlackBerry outage, drivers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi failed to run into each other with their usual vigor:

In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.

On average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi there is a fatal accident every two days.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the chief of Dubai Police, and Brig Gen Hussein Al Harethi, the director of the Abu Dhabi Police traffic department, linked the drop in accidents to the disruption of BlackBerry services between Tuesday and Thursday

Police around the world are notorious for saying whatever stupid, unproveable thing comes into their minds — in one famous case a few decades ago, a policeman estimated that a 4.5-liter US-spec Porsche 928 was doing “about 200mph” at the time of an accident — but in this case there may well be correlation between the service outage and an interruption in on-road fatalities. It’s already illegal to use a BlackBerry on the move in the Emirates, so there won’t be any new legislation as a result of these figures. Nor is it certain that there is any correlation between Arab text-and-crash accidents and conditions in North America. The cultures are very different, as made plain by the top comment on the National’s article:

police say, BlackBerry cuts made roads safer. The Headline Begs for Tough Fines (3000Dhs) for anyone using mobile phones while driving. If god had intended for you to drive and use a mobile communication Device, like a spider he would have given you 8 eyes.