Several states passed laws prohibiting the use of hand-held cell phones. Did these laws work? (Reduce accidents?)
No, according to a study by the Highway Loss Data Institute reported on by Top News.
According the the study/story, the rates where a ban has been passed mirror those of neighboring states with no law. Thus no decrease was seen by having a criminal penalty for hand held cell phone use.
Almost everyone agrees that drivers can be distracted by cell phone use so why didn’t this bans work? Here are some of my ideas…
1. Hand held cell phones is only one of many distractions.
2. Enforcement – people still use their phones.
3. People use phones in hands fee mode and are still distracted.
Have other ideas why this ban doesn’t improve accident statistics? Leave them here as a comment.
One more note …
I was over in the UK recently. They have all sorts of laws to make a driver pay attention. One of the big stories was a man who got a ticket for blowing his nose while he was stopped in traffic. The officer thought he was not “in full control of his vehicle.”
Next, making sneezing illegal while driving…
It is clear from all the research that simply banning the use of hand held cell phones won’t make a difference – we didn’t need to pay for a seperate study to find this out. Most the research into cell phone use already indicates it is the act of holding the conversation (not holding the phone) that is the major distraction so banning hand helds has simply missed the point (Management Systems – Corrective Action NI).
As for those that then argue “well what about talking to your passengers” – there is a major difference in that your passengers are in the car with you and can see the road conditions you are negotiating and therefore manage the conversation accordingly.
Until Politicians bite the bullet and implement the full corrective action needed as per the results from the research (a ban on all cell phone use while driving) then people will continue to die from this preventatable cause. Unfortunately such action is likely to loss votes so I don’t think we’ll see it ever happen.
The bigger and potential problem I see, is to write text messages on cell phones while you are driving.
- – What is ignored in discussions of this issue is the variable of attentional cognitive skills. Even looking in the rearview mirror (generally considered a good thing to do somewhat frequently) is a distraction from the straight-ahead view, and to do this safely requires the cultivation of a habit of limiting the time one spends with eyes averted from the straight-ahead view, NO MATTER WHAT. This in turn can be helped by cultivating a habit of anticipating the rear-view glance and the quick focus it requires to get a quick assessment of the positions of other cars on the road, and cultivating the habit of a second-glance (after an intervening fix on the road ahead) instead of one long look. And so on, and so on. Part of this kind of training is simply making people more aware that their attentional processes can be deliberately trained and directed.
— Driving is full of distractions, and some people are better at handling them than others, and the differences that make some better at managing distractions are in part due to cognitive habits and skills that can be taught and cultivated.
—Texting presents a unique problem, given the complexity of the visual, cognitive, and manual tasks involved, and is probably so immune to cognitive solutions for the vast majority that it needs to be banned, but one ameliorative possibility might be a one-button phone function that returns a call to the sender of any text message, so that the message wouldn’t have to be read at all. “Hi, I’m driving and can’t do any text messages now.”
— But banning cellphone use generally seems a bit too least-common-denominator, Big-Mother-is-watching, control-freaky to me.
—People learn to push the envelope out to a new perimeter when new safety devices are implemented, as happened with anti-lock brakes. (After an initial dip in the related accidents, the rate rebounded over time.) And too much institutionalized risk-aversion seems to beget intuitive or reactionary risk-taking for its own sake, a kind of class warfare between the i-dotting, t-crossing actuarial types and more adventurous people. The former should keep in mind the contributions of risktakers in society’s innovative accomplishments, and that if they stigmatize risk too much, the dynamic engine that generates the wealth to support their fastidious standards could be severely impaired, along with a lot of the personal liberties that the Bill of Rights endorses, and which are central to American values.
— There’s a lot of potential for unintended consequences here. Attention is an active cognitive process, and for society to inculcate too much of a passive-safety mindset discourages active attention. People generalize. Sending out messages that individuals don’t have to take responsibility for their own safety, and can trust the experts/authorities to regulate their activity and design devices that are always safe, and then expecting people to stay on the ball, is contradictory. You can’t learn to manage risk without being exposed to risk, and there’s a body of research on this regarding populations who are most protected from risk and autonomy– the elderly and mentally ill. Both groups have been found to do better when they control more of their own destinies than has been recent custom.
—This despite an inherent bias in the methods of social science research toward conceiving the object of study as passive (i.e. the objectified masses), in contrast to the subjective, very-active intellectual processes of the theorizer/researcher, a bias that matters in this context. The very act of measuring or theorizing about people’s behavior construes people as more passive than they are, or can be. It’s in the cognitive act of objectification, and has political and ethical implications that are also troubling.
—There are diminishing-return limits to the effectiveness of coerced/imposed safety at both the macro-and micro levels.
—The 2 concrete suggestions here are the one-button return-call cellphone function for incoming text messages and the development of computer games that train people in the conscious direction of their attention. (The latter, though, would require two networked computers, though, to simulate information coming from two directions at once.) Still, attentional skills could be trained without computers, during driver’s training, if those doing the training give some of their own attention to the matter.
Wow! That’s a thoughtful comment!
Mark