Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Blackberry Messaging Outage Credited With Drop In Dubai Traffic Collisions

Wow, here's an interesting story about the effects of texting and driving: a dramatic fall in traffic accidents in Dubai in October has been directly linked to a three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

Collisions fell 20% from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. Email, Messenger and internet functions were unavailable to users in the Middle East, Africa and Europe after a crucial link in the BlackBerry network failed.

The National says there is usually a fatal accident every two days in Abu Dhabi, but during the outage there wasn't a single fatality.

2 comments:

Charles said...

Does not surprise me at all, I see people talking on their cell phones up to their ear every time I walk to the bus, does not look to me like the law is making even a slight change in the habits of those people.

SRTC Staff said...

I've seen so many people doing the same thing that I didn't even think that local law enforcement was pulling people over for talking on phones. Until my brother got a ticket for it recently. He agrees he shouldn't have been doing it and deserves the ticket.


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.