Originally Posted by invisiblehand

Intuitively, I concur with the above arguments. That is, to my common sense, it appears that there are dramatically more "tools" available for distraction and consequently it should be a much larger problem today. While some headlines one would think that there would be some huge spike in collisions, injuries, and mortality conditioning on a few obvious things, but based on rough aggregate data -- essentially, I played with the NHTSA FARS -- it is hard to support a big increase in mortality associated with distracted driving.

Now I think that there are enough studies that demonstrate that distracted driving is a real problem and fundamentally responsible for a large proportion of collisions, injuries, and mortality. I just think that it has always been a problem but that the distractions are more obvious today and that there is some risk compensation going on. For instance, when someone starts texting while driving, I'll speculate that the person is more likely to slow down.