Cell phones and SUVs tearing up the road. (Comment).

You mean to say using cell phones contributes to car crashes? What a surprise!!! Rude, self-involved jerks actually get distracted while dialing up their oh-so-important numbers and then ram into some unsuspecting motorist minding his own lane? Who could imagine such a thing?

Number-crunchers with the California Highway Patrol finally realized last week that they had significantly understated the number of traffic accidents caused by cell phones. Over a nine-month period last year, we're talking about 4,699 accidents statewide that killed 31 and injured 2,786, according to the Los Angeles Times. An earlier CHP report put the number of accidents at 913.

Even that higher number seems suspect. Accompanying the Times story is a chart showing that the total jumps to 8,834 when factoring accidents that involved all drivers using cell phones. No one can come up with an actual number because car crashes often aren't the result of a single event but a series of events. Besides, people tend to lie at accident scenes.

Here is a case where life experience wills out over numbers. For anyone who spends time on the road, it's irrefutable that erratic driving and cell phones go hand in hand. More so than listening to the radio or munching on a Big Mac, using cell phones is an interactive exercise that requires single-minded attention otherwise focused on watching the road. Sooner or later, the driver is bound to look down at the wrong time.

Something has to be done, right? Maybe legislation that bans the use of hand-held cell phones, with stiff fines or even license revocation for repeat offenders? Cell phone haters would jump at such a law, but Sacramento legislators are certain to wilt at the prohibitions and penalties -- and instead offer up the most watered-down proposal. Alas, too many voters are perfectly happy with their cells and too many cell phone lobbyists simply won't allow it to happen.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, think three letters: S-U-V.

By now, it's hardly debatable that sport utility vehicles are a road menace that each year results in the loss of several thousand lives and many thousands of injuries. The larger ones block the view for passenger cars, their headlights shine into the rear-view mirrors of car drivers, their drivers are unaccustomed to handling their truck-like chassis, and they're a gas-guzzling environmental disaster.

One study found that a Ford Explorer was 16 times more likely than the average family car to kill occupants of another vehicle. A separate government test found that 2,000 Americans a year would still be alive if a big passenger car rather than an SUV had struck them. Sure, the numbers might be off -- maybe it's 1,200 or 3,000 -- but could any reasonable person question the ugly aftermath of a GMC Yukon mixing it up with a Honda Civic? As Tom Magliozzi, co-host of public radio's "Car Talk," told The New Yorker: "When you get hit by one of them, the bumper comes right in your window and takes your head off."

The cynical answer to roadway self-preservation is to buy a bigger SUV. George Hoffer, a Virginia College University economist and frequent expert trial witness for insurance companies, told the Toronto Globe and Mall that taking SUV's off the road wouldn't eliminate the imbalance between small cars and, say, tractor-trailers. (By the way, Hoffer says he's embarrassed that his own SUVs are smaller than those of his neighbor. "I am an American pig," he confessed.)

The problem with Hoffer's argument is that tractor-trailers have a valuable and specific purpose -- transporting goods from place to place -- and they are driven by professionals who generally know how to handle their rigs. SUV's, by contrast, have little utilitarian purpose and are driven by amateurs. They exist largely to make people feel superior.

So there you have it. Cell phone use contributes to more traffic accidents than first believed, while SUVs cause a disproportionate amount of death and injury when an accident actually happens. Meanwhile, the government, aside from occasional lip service, isn't doing a damn thing about it.

High time, I would say, to stay home and read a book.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.