On 10/15/2016 12:01 PM, nospam wrote:
In article ,
(PeteCresswell) wrote:

The AMTA indicates that a tenth of 1 percent of Australian crashes are
"related" to illegal cellphone use:

I have always wondered how the people who gather statistics determine
whether a driver in a crash was using a cell phone.

It would seem that only a vanishingly-small percentage of drivers would
own up to cell phone use when being interviewed for an accident report.

That would seem to leave the police finding the cell phone, determining
it's ID or phone number, looking up use in the phone company's database,
and correlating time of calls with the moment of the accident.... all of
which also seem to be of vanishingly-small probability.

that's how they do it, and the time of the crash is not always known.

Am I missing something?

no.


Actually, determining the approximate time of the crash should be possible:
note the phone's present location in the telco's records and then work
backwards to determine when it stopped moving -- the crash happened
sometime after the last recorded movement. Not precise but it is a better
guess than none at all.