Cell Phone Bill Advances in Senate While Study Sees No Impact

Go on. Guess how many are on cellphones.

SB 6345--the Senate bill that would make (non-handsfree) cell phone use while driving a $124 ticket and a primary offense--was placed on second reading by the Rules Committee yesterday. (I have no idea what that means, outside of a sense of progress. There's no lyric about "second reading by Rules Committee" in Schoolhouse Rock's "How a Bill Becomes a Law.") With eleven senators sponsoring, it may have enough momentum to pass.

Its House counterpart, HB 2365, had a public hearing by the House transportation committee on the 18th, with no doings reported since then.

But the Highway Loss Data Institute--an insurer-funded nonprofit organization--has just released a study showing that anti-cell phone laws have had no effect on the number of collisions. As KING TV reports, the study compares "insurance claims for crash damage in four jurisdictions before and after bans were enacted in California, New York, Connecticut, and Washington, DC."

It's a puzzling result because the amount of risk--you're four times more likely to crash while using a cell phone and driving--has been established by more than one study. The researchers claim that they can estimate a significant reduction in cell phone use after the laws were passed--which, completely anecdotally, I would be hard-pressed to believe. But at a four-fold risk, even a slight decrease in usage should have a multiplying effect that has not shown up in the data.

The answer to this puzzle has been documented since at least 2005, with studies that demonstrated that handsfree or not, cell phone use while driving is dangerous. An NHTSA report noted that even if handsfree devices did help, that benefit was outweighed by the fact that people made more calls, and stayed on them longer, while driving. Very much like how people on diets eat more of low-calorie foods.

That is, there's no mystery at all. Any kind of mobile phone use while driving makes the roads less safe. Giving people a handsfree out just served the pleasing fiction that government was looking out for citizens.