Blackberry outage lowers accident rate in the UAE?

Quite a few websites are linking to an article in Abu Dhabi newspaper The National that reports claims a recent worldwide Blackberry service outage led to a 40% fall in the traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi and 20% in Dubai – although the police haven’t released the specific numbers. The suggestion is that people couldn’t use their devices while driving so weren’t suffering from accidents caused by distraction.

According to an earlier article in The National, there were approximately 320 traffic accidents a day in Abu Dhabi (116,487 in total) in 2009, or approximately one accident every 4.5 minutes. The current article claims that there is now an accident every 3 minutes in Abu Dhabi (320 a day, 175,200 a year).

Now these sort of numbers look impressive, but, as we have seen previously in a Thomas Lumley post about New Zealand’s accident figures, they can be a bit misleading.

The population of Abu Dhabi in 2009 was estimated to be 896,751. The estimated population of the emirate was put at around 1.643 million. Using the smaller figures, the accident rate is about 1 every 7 years, which as Thomas previously pointed out, sounds somewhat less impressive than one every 3 minutes.

To put the 2011 figures in perspective, we need an estimate of the current population size, which we don’t have – a census is due to be carried out this year. The population of Abu Dhabi is increasingly rapidly (in 1975 there were ~200,000 in the emirate). If we choose a conservative figure of 1 million, the accident rate has gone up a bit to one about every 5.7 years. If the 40% is real, and was applied to every day of the year, this figure would change to 1 accident in every 9.5 years.

Of course, not everyone in the population is a driver! 57% of the population is aged 15-64 (which totals 511,148 people), and in 2008 there were 676,660 drivers. The demographics of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of which Abu Dhabi and Dubai are a part, are quite interesting. The male/female sex ratio (in the 15-65 age group) is highly skewed at 2.743, or approximately 73.3% male and 26.7% female, and according to this article only 15% of drivers (in Dubai) with licenses are females. So let’s look at this again. In 2008 there were 116,487 accidents amongst approximately 676,660 drivers which works out to be 0.17 accidents per driver for the year, or 1 every 5.8 years. The rates are undoubtedly different for males and females.

What can we say from all this? Not a lot, but even if the dip in traffic accidents is real, it is unlikely to have a major effect on the annual total.