Comment by eszed

> people would look at the map before setting off

Yeah, I drove back then. That's not, in practice, what people did, or only what people did. People did map out a route ahead of time, of course, but when they (we) got confused, or missed a turn, out came the map - while driving. Not saying it's good, but that's what happened.

> people driving just fine before satnav

You can check the data. DOT's website is terrible, so I can't link to individual tables, but the relevant one is under Trends > General > Table 1:

https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#

Fatalities and Injuries are obviously dependent on (very welcome!) advances in automobile safety design and medical care, but if accident rates have been increasing over time we'd expect to see many more "property damage only"° accidents. In fact, the raw number of those have been remarkably stable since 1988, despite a huge increase in miles traveled!

There's even an absolute-number decrease between 2007 and 2013, which corresponds with the years during which mobile phones became ubiquitous, and a relative (to miles-traveled) decrease which continues to this day. None of this (of course!) excuses allowing oneself to use a phone in a distracting manner, but my conclusion is that mobile phones have, on net, made driving safer, rather than the reverse.

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° Or, alternatively "all-type"? I think "property damage" might be cleaner - and, in fact, it's strongly biased against my case, because it's risen from 67% of accidents at the beginning of the dataset to 71% more recently, due to exogenous safety and life-saving improvements.