[填空题]Cell-Phone Bans While Driving Have More
Impact in Dense, Urban Areas
A The study,
conducted by Sheldon Jacobson, a professor of computer science and the director
of the simulation and optimisation laboratory at Illinois, analysed the
relationship between pre-and post-law automobile accident rates using public
data from 62 counties in New York. Jacobson and co-researchers Alexander
Nikolaev and Matthew Robbins published their results in an article titled
Evaluating the Impact of Legislation Prohibiting Hand-Held Cell Phone Use While
Driving, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal Transportation
Research Part A: Policy and Practice.
B The team found
that after banning hand-held cell phone use while driving, 46 counties in New
York experienced lower fatal accident rates, 10 of which did so at a
statistically significant level, while all 62 counties experienced lower
personal injury accident rates. They also discovered that the personal injury
accident rate decrease was more substantive in counties such as Bronx, New York
and Queens, where there was a high density of licensed drivers rather than in
sparsely populated areas of upstate New York. ’What that suggests is, if you
have a congestion of cars and you’re distracted, you’re more likely to hit
someone,’ Jacobson said. ’If you have a lower congestion of cars, you’re still
distracted, but you’re less likely to hit anyone because there are less people
to hit. It’s simple probability.’ Driver distraction is thought to be the cause
of nearly 80 per cent of automobile accidents in the U.S., resulting in about
2,600 deaths, 330,000 injuries and 1.5 million instances of property damage
annually.
C Although a ban on hand-held cell phone use
while driving in rural areas has less of an impact on driver safety, Jacobson
says that doesn’t necessarily mean the ban itself is worthless. ’Hand-held cell
phone bans are very valuable in high-density urban areas, but less so in
lower-density rural areas,’ Jacobson said. ’But that doesn’t mean they have no
impact in rural areas. It just means that such legislation is less likely to
have an impact on driver accident rates.’
D Jacobson’s
study differs from other studies in that, rather than focusing on reaction times
of simulated drivers in lab setting, it analysed publicly available data of
accident rates published by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. To
allow for a proper comparison between time periods, the years 1997 to 2001 were
treated as the pre-law time period, and the years 2002 to 2007 were considered
as the post-law time period. ’Nobody’s done a study like this before,’ he said.
’Everything prior to this is a micro-analysis of reaction time in laboratories
by researchers.’ The challenge, Jacobson said, was getting the right data to
analyse. ’The best state that had the data to analyse was New York,’ he said.
’They’ve had the hand-held cell phone ban in place since 2001. So we had a lot
of data.’
E Jacobson said one of the limitations of the
study is extrapolating the data from New York state and projecting it onto the
nation at large. ’That’s fraught with problems, but these are limitations we
acknowledge,’ he said. ’Every state is unique, but the overall conclusions still
stand to reason.’ Jacobson, who also holds appointments as a professor of
industrial and enterprise systems engineering, of civil and environmental
engineering, says the holy grail of data sets to analyse would be the property
damage data collected by insurance companies. Jacobson says the difference
between his study and one recently published by the Highway Loss Data Institute,
an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, is that he used
publicly available data and the number of licensed drivers as a proxy for
accident prediction. (The insurance industry-backed report studied pre- and
post-ban insurance claims from accidents in California, Connecticut, New York
and Washington, D.C. It contends that state laws banning the use of cell phones
while driving didn’t reduce the number of vehicle crashes.) If the property
damage data were available to Jacobson and his co-researchers, ’We could come up
with a more definitive statement,’ he said.
F Another
challenge for Jacobson and his team was how to standardise accident data across
the counties. Their solution was to use the number of licensed drivers and
compare the statistical inferences to licensed-driver density. ’Measuring the
throughput of cars is very difficult,’ Jacobson said. ’As a result, using the
number of licensed drivers is a reasonable way to standardise, and
licensed-driver density provided an interesting measure to compare the
counties.’ The measures of traffic safety considered in the study are the number
of fatal automobile accidents per 100,000 licensed drivers per year and the
number of personal injury accidents per 1,000 licensed drivers per year,
Jacobson said. For the purpose of analysis, the personal injury accident rate
proved to be a more appropriate measure. ’The trend that we saw was that
high-density driving areas tended to have a more precipitous drop in the number
of fatalities and accidents after the ban was implemented than in lower- density
areas,’ Jacobson said. ’This was more pronounced for personal-injury rates than
it was for fatality rates.’
G Despite the exponential
growth in cell phone subscribers, Jacobson says that all the evidence suggests
that hand-held cell phone bans while driving are worthwhile. ’All the evidence
suggests hand-held cell phone bans while driving are a good thing, and this is
more evidence to that effect,’ he said. ’But it doesn’t establish it
definitively. There’s still more work to be done, but this helps to further
clarify the picture.’Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose
the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings
below. Write the correct number, Ⅰ-ⅩⅢ, in boxes on your answer
sheet. List of Headings
Ⅰ All areas being affected by the law Ⅱ
The limitation of this study Ⅲ The special
character of Jacobson’s investigation Ⅳ The cause
of 80% car drivers accidents Ⅴ Basic information
about the investigation Ⅵ The challenge about how
to regulate data Ⅶ Less effect of the law on the
countryside area Ⅷ Less accidents after the
law Ⅸ The challenge about analysing data
Ⅹ The effectiveness of the investigation and the future
expectation Ⅺ The implementation of new
experiment Ⅻ The publication of investigative
data ⅩⅢ The proportion of accidents in high density
areas Paragraph
