The Road Safety Monitor 2006: Distracted Driving
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Road Safety Monitor (RSM) is an annual public opinion survey by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) that takes the pulse of the nation on key road safety issues by means of a telephone survey of a random, representative sample of Canadian drivers. The results of the RSM are released in a series of reports – the present one focuses on driver distraction. Results show that a growing number of Canadians are concerned about distracted driving – in a previous survey in 2001, about 40% of Canadians thought distracted driving was a serious problem; the current survey found that nearly 70% thought it was a serious problem. 95.5% of drivers think there is more distracted driving today than there was 5 years ago. Distractions from outside the vehicle were reported more often as a problem than distractions from within the vehicle – for example, 9.5% of the drivers surveyed said they had to brake or steer to avoid a collision caused by a distraction inside the vehicle, whereas over twice that number (20.2%) said they had to brake or steer to avoid a collision caused by a distraction outside the vehicle. Age of driver was unrelated to problems associated with distractions arising from outside the vehicle but was closely related to problems with internal distractions – e.g., 19.5% of young drivers reported they had to brake or steer to avoid a collision as a result of a distraction arising inside the vehicle, compared to only 6% of 55-64 year olds. The use of a cell phone while driving appears to be increasing – in 2001, 20.5% of drivers reported using a cell phone while driving in the past seven days; in the current survey that number had risen to 37%. However, there also appears to be a trend toward lower usage time – e.g., there has been an increase in the percentage of drivers who use their cell phone for less than 10 minutes a week (from 57.6% in 2001 to 69.4% in 2006) and a decrease in those who use it between 10 and 20 minutes (from 23.4% to 14.7%). Further monitoring is necessary before drawing definitive conclusions about these changes. Male drivers and young drivers aged 16-34 are more likely to report using their cell phone while driving. Canadians overwhelmingly support more educational and awareness efforts on the broader issue of distracted driving. More specifically, on the potential dangers associated with the use of electronic devices, there is little agreement regarding the most effective prevention measures; however, there is considerable support for a restriction on the use of cell phones by new drivers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".