I’ve already explained that the increased use in cellular phones is not responsible for automobile accident rates in the United States as cellular phone usage has increased drastically while the rate of accidents has decreased. Now the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety are brining up the fact cell phone bans accomplish nothing (except increase revenue for police departments of course):
Cell phone bans, such as those recently recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board, have so far proven useless when it comes to actually reducing car crashes, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The Insurance Institute is a private group financed by auto insurers. The National Transportation Safety Board recently recommended that states adopt strict rules banning all non-driving-related use of hand-held devices such as cell phones — even hands-free — while driving.
Many states already have bans on hand-held cell phone use and on texting while driving. The Insurance Institute has studied crash rates before and after bans were enacted in various states and also compared them to crash rates in nearby states with no such bans.
While the bans have resulted in actual reductions in phone use, they have not resulted in any reduction in crash rates, according to the Institute.
Since insurance companies are the ones who end up paying out when automobile crashes occur I would say their best interest lies in advocating any restriction that reduces the rate of crashes. In other words it would be in their best interest to find the exact opposite of these results so any accusations about these results being skewed because of the “evil greedy corporations” need to be backed by some pretty hard evidence.
Seeing these results we’re forced to consider there is a different cause for auto accidents. Perhaps some people are just bad drivers and if they’re not distracted by their phone they’ll find something else to distract themselves with. Of course this study will be entirely ignored by various state government and our overreaching federal government because, damn it, we have to do something!
This is a great example of fear mongering and political power grabs. If safety was really the issue then DOT would make eating while driving illegal and remove radios from all cars. Both of these are shown to cause far more wrecks than mobile devices but we all know they won’t make them illegal.
Can you imagine how dangerous reading while driving is and yet before ‘mobile devices’ we all used paper maps in the car while behind the wheel. I never heard anyone pushing to ban paper maps? I figure if a cop can send email on his laptop while driving I should be able to navigate the gps on my smartphone. Some people will always do stupid things. One more law won’t fix stupid.