One of the reasons why ensuring alternatives to driving is so important is that road fatalities are the number one cause of non-natural death in developed countries (see for example table here) and increasing in developing countries.
Highway interchange in Dubai (photo: Paolo Keller)
The underlying causes of road accidents can be several from infrastructure to speeding and alcohol/drug use, but one topic gaining attention especially in the US media is distracted driving (see e.g. http://www.distraction.gov/), the effects of which have been severely underestimated in the previous years.
I.e. in many U.S. states talking and texting on a mobile phone is legal and talking with a headset is legal even in most of Europe. However. not so new research shows that talking on the phone, whether with or without headset, is comparably dangerous to drunk driving.
Last week, “thanks” to Blackberry, evidence have been collected that texting on the phone is indeed probably a major cause of distracted driving and accidents. During the Blackberry network outage, accident rates dropped significantly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, an area where otherwise road fatalities are shockingly frequent.
