> if you take out alcohol and cell phones, you've reduced 70-80% of driving related fatalities with those two alone
I don't believe that's supported by data. A quick search finds alcohol involved in ~30% of all fatal crashes and cell phones involved in ~20% of all crashes (though probably significantly underreported). Even boosting the cell phone rate by quite a bit, there will still be considerable overlap between the two groups, so likely nowhere near 70% in total.
The root cause is that we're letting a bunch of primates steer fast moving, heavy metal objects around a highway (and really the fact that we easily distract ourselves and make bad decisions about drinking and driving is a great example of why the whole thing is generally a bad idea).
I don't believe that's supported by data. A quick search finds alcohol involved in ~30% of all fatal crashes and cell phones involved in ~20% of all crashes (though probably significantly underreported). Even boosting the cell phone rate by quite a bit, there will still be considerable overlap between the two groups, so likely nowhere near 70% in total.
The root cause is that we're letting a bunch of primates steer fast moving, heavy metal objects around a highway (and really the fact that we easily distract ourselves and make bad decisions about drinking and driving is a great example of why the whole thing is generally a bad idea).