LIHU‘E — While the County Council continues to tweak a proposed ban on handheld electronics for Kaua‘i drivers, a leading institute on highway safety reported last week that similar laws across the country have not resulted in a lower incidence
LIHU‘E — While the County Council continues to tweak a proposed ban on handheld electronics for Kaua‘i drivers, a leading institute on highway safety reported last week that similar laws across the country have not resulted in a lower incidence of traffic accidents.
“The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” Adrian Lund, president of both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute, said in a press release Friday.
HLDI researchers, sponsored by the automobile insurance industry, calculated monthly collision claims per 100 insured vehicle years for vehicles up to three years old during the months immediately before and after handheld phone use was banned while driving in New York (November 2001), Washington, D.C. (July 2004), Connecticut (October 2005), and California (July 2008), the release says.
Comparable data were collected for nearby jurisdictions without such bans, a method that controlled for possible changes in collision claim rates unrelated to the bans like changes in the number of miles driven due to the economy or seasonal changes in driving patterns, the release says.
Month-to-month fluctuations in rates of collision claims in jurisdictions with bans didn’t change from before to after the laws were enacted, nor did the patterns change in comparison with trends in jurisdictions that didn’t have such laws, the release says.
“So the new findings don’t match what we already know about the risk of phoning and texting while driving,” Lund said in the release. “If crash risk increases with phone use and fewer drivers use phones where it’s illegal to do so, we would expect to see a decrease in crashes. But we aren’t seeing it.”
The findings could further the theory that banning handheld electronic use while allowing hands-free headsets does not solve the problem of distracted driving.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, has stated in recent years that both handheld and hands-free electronics use led to a “cognitive distraction” significant enough to degrade a driver’s performance.
Last week, U.S Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced federal guidance to expressly prohibit texting by drivers of commercial vehicles, effective immediately.
“We want the drivers of big rigs and buses and those who share the roads with them to be safe,” LaHood said in a Jan. 26 press release. “This is an important safety step and we will be taking more to eliminate the threat of distracted driving.”
Earlier in January, the U.S. DOT and the National Safety Council announced the creation of FocusDriven, the first national nonprofit organization devoted specifically to raising awareness about the dangers of distracted driving.
References to hands-free devices like Bluetooth headsets or mounted speakerphone jacks in the proposed Kaua‘i law were removed prior to the bill’s introduction because Councilman Derek Kawakami did not want the bill to be used as an endorsement for a technology that may or may not be less dangerous than hand-held electronic devices.
Attorney Charley Foster, who writes about local legal issues on his Planet Kaua‘i blog noted the connection between the study and Kaua‘i’s proposed law Saturday.
On the Net: www.iihs.org, www.distraction.gov, planetkauai.blogspot.com
