The long-elusive silver bullet of traffic safety, if you read this press release, has arrived in the form of the … iPhone!

From the same company that produces a “speed trap” detection application for the iPhone, thus decreasing the safety of the road both in terms of speed and distraction, comes this bold claim:

Njection.com (http://bit.ly/gJjNa) added another layer to their Speed Trap mapping system today by including traffic accidents and fatalities to enhance their data visualization system. This addition will allow drivers to see where accident black spots and problem areas are. An updated Njection Mobile iPhone application [iTunes] (http://bit.ly/4ZFmg) that allows drivers to be alerted to these high accident areas is awaiting approval from Apple.

[uh, quick interjection; a good deal of crash blackspots are at intersections, which are typically controlled by traffic lights, and sometimes, because people don’t seem capable of obeying simple traffic signals, red light cameras, which your software will also sniff out — thus potentially increasing the very crash blackspot-ness! How wonderfully intregrated!]

Njection.com has acquired accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA – http://bit.ly/C5gpV) and global weather conditions from WeatherBug.com (http://bit.ly/uwmK2), and coupled this information with Microsoft Virtual Earth (http://maps.live.com) to produce a unique use of data visualization. This Virtual Earth mash-up not only allows users to view 5 years of accident data collected from the NHTSA based on local weather conditions but to see it in 4-hour blocks updated every hour from the current time. For example, if it is 12PM and a user selects the “4 hour history” radio button, they will be shown a history of accidents that have occurred between 11AM and 3PM based on the local weather conditions.

I realize this is a press release (regurgitated without comment by Fox Business), and not to mention this is still early days for the iPhone — every app is announced with breathtaking excitement, but most will be revealed as useless geegaws, to be marveled at over drinks for fifteen minutes with your friends and then cast into the silicon attic.

But apart from the incredible irony of this company suddenly being concerned with “safety” this is incredibly wrong-headed on several fronts. First, as any number of SatNav crashes have shown, taking drivers eyes and minds off the road, reducing their situational awareness, is not a good idea. Full stop. Rather than scanning some tiny screen to look for time-and-weather coded crash data, one should actually be looking at the actual conditions of the road one is on.

Then, there’s the problem of regression to the mean. A place may be an “accident black spot” for a time, then have no crashes for the next number of years. What are we to do with that information? And, given that the vast majority crashes have driver behavior at their root, not slippery bridge surfaces and the like, presenting crash data as somehow a function of road conditions is disingenuous. And, as always, does highlighting places of greater crash frequency leave one less vigilant at other locations?

The best way the iPhone could contribute to traffic safety in the car — apart from the long-awaited breathalyzer app — is it for it to be turned off.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Risk, Traffic safety, Traffic Wonkery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.