As a scooterist, I’ve been the survivor of countless near-misses here in downtown Chicago and Dutcher Stiles can confirm that the problem isn’t limited to my neighborhood.

Now we get some data from Boston.com regarding risks of multi-tasking behind the wheel.

The most extensive study of driver behavior — released last year by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute after monitoring 100 motorists in the Washington, D.C., area, each for about a year — found that 80 percent of the 82 crashes and 65 percent of 761 near-crashes occurred when drivers were distracted, primarily by wireless devices such as cellphones and PDAs.

“We definitely saw that any time a driver’s eyes were away from the roadway doing any secondary task . . . the more dangerous it is and the more devices that come into a vehicle, the more that risk increases,” said Charlie Klauer, the senior research associate who headed the study.

Federal safety officials estimate that driver distraction or inattention is to blame for up to 30 percent of all crashes, about 1.2 million a year. It’s dangerous enough that many states are taking action.

Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in traffic has seen people doing all sorts of things behind the wheel which have no place there.

The latest is the rise of electronic interruptions, which I agree are actually worse than the traditional eating-while-driving, grooming-while-driving (I’ve seen both shavers & make-up artists) or even reading-while-driving or working-the-crossword-while-driving in that the device demands attention and people feel psychologically bound to react, putting the driving effectively “on hold” while they do so. That is, as I see it, the truly aggravating factor related to driving-while-{texting|phoning|emailing|.*}.

Recently, for example, I spent about half an hour in heavy traffic behind a girl watching a girl named Jessica (according to the nametag hanging from her rearview mirror) texting constantly. She had several near-rear-end collisions and managed to sit through the first 5-10 seconds of every green light she when she was near the front of the queue. I decided that the safest place in that particular traffic stream was directly behind her until the chance arose to get fully clear of her area of impact.

Not only did she put herself at risk, but her inattentiveness led to even more aggressive behavior by those around her, thus further amplifying the risk of an accident within her vicinity.

One thing we often fail to consider when assessing risk is the amplification effect that it might have. Will it produce cascading failures? Does it have a “ripple effect” increasing the likelihood (and thus the risk) of seemingly independent events? If so, how would you measure it? For that matter, how would you even know?