Flawed Handheld Phone Bans Don’t Stop Distracted Driving

[B' Spokes: Note that Maryland allows hands free operation of a cell phone.]
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by Payton Chung, Streets Blog

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What Mulligan doesn’t mention is that distracted driving hardly stopped when today’s loophole-ridden and inconsistently enforced laws banned only the most obvious forms of distracted driving. Nor does Cheng’s paper make a convincing case that the newer, broader bans on texting while driving won’t save lives.

Cheng’s study, covering 2004-2010, even references earlier studies from the likes of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that show that today’s laws, which largely allow drivers to use phones via hands-free devices, have no basis in fact and would not be expected to save lives. As a 2009 meta-study cited by the National Safety Council put it: “Current research does not support the decision to allow hands-free phone use while driving.” Whether a driver controls the phone using her or his hands, through a headset, or through the car stereo, makes no difference: any driver using a phone is a distracted driver.
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What will it take to disarm the menace of drivers distracted by their phones? Safety advocates, like the National Transportation Safety Board and the NSC, say that nothing short of a total ban on device use by drivers will stop the dangers of distracted drivers (and not just of cars: phone use by professional operators has also been implicated in bus, train, and boat crashes). Others, like the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons, make an analogy to drunk driving laws. Two forces — an effective national awareness campaign that stigmatized drunk driving, and national legislation that codified a uniform, quantitative metric of intoxication — combined to sharply reduce the number of drunk driving crashes.
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