After the three-day Blackberry outage across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, The National (the English newspaper of the United Arab Emirates) reports the upside of the said outage:

A dramatic fall in traffic accidents this week has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.

I’d like to see more concrete evidence here, but anecdotally, this makes sense: texting kills.

One statistic from the article that seems excessive to me:

On average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi there is a fatal accident every two days.

Does anyone know of such traffic statistics for other cities around the world?