Cellphone ban doesn't impact collision rate

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(TOM BOLAND / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Here's a question I never thought I'd ask: Does banning cellphone use while driving lower the number of overall collisions?

And here's an answer I never thought I'd give: Maybe not as much as we would like to think.

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was originally reported online earlier this month in Accident Analysis & Prevention, and appeared in Monday's Boston Globe, which is where I came across it.

Essentially, this is what the MIT study concluded: You can take cells away from people who frequently use them while driving, but you can't stop their inherent tendency to drive in other risky ways.

"The people who are more willing to frequently engage in cellphone use are higher-risk drivers, independent of the phone," Bryan Reimer, associate director of MIT's New England University Transportation Center, told the Globe. "It's not just a subtle difference with those willing to pick up the phone," he added. "This is a big difference."

The subtext, which wasn't explicitly stated, is if these drivers don't kill people because they're on their cellphones, they'll do it driving in some other dangerous or distracted way.

The findings were based on the habits of 108 drivers from Greater Boston, half of whom confessed to frequently using cellphones while driving and half of whom said they did that rarely.

Researchers found frequent cell users drove faster, changed lanes more often, spent more time in the left lane and tended to do more hard-braking and rapid accelerating. More specifically, frequent users -- sounds like a term for a drug addict doesn't it? -- on average travelled 4.4 kilometres per hour faster and changed lanes twice as often as rare users.

No one, least of all me, is disputing how dangerous it is to use a cellphone while driving. According to the Boston Globe story, America's National Safety Council estimates about one in five of the 5.4 million car crashes in the U.S. during 2010 involved drivers who were talking on their cellphones. Another 160,000 are estimated to have involved drivers texting.

Here's what's perplexing about those findings.

Private insurance companies have not seen an overall increase in traffic collisions despite the growing numbers of drivers and soaring popularity of cellphones. In the U.S., there hasn't been a noticeable drop in accidents even though 39 U.S. states have banned texting while driving, and 10 have made it illegal to talk on the phone while operating a vehicle.

"We have not seen that those bans have reduced crashes," Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va., bluntly told the Globe.

That's why Lund and others don't see how cellphone laws help.

Manitoba Public Insurance takes its direction from the province, so you won't hear that from them. What they do agree on is this:

"MPI has no evidence locally that traffic accidents are up since the use of cellphones," said corporation spokesman Brian Smiley.

In fact, despite there being more drivers on Manitoba roads every year and the near addictive nature of cellphone use, the number of traffic collisions in the province has decreased over the last decade. Particularly between 2007 and 2010. Manitoba banned cell use while driving halfway through 2010.

Nevertheless, people are dying because of distracted drivers.

"Be it texting while driving," Smiley said, "talking on the cellphone, animated conversation with passengers, trying to pick up CDs off the floor, eating while driving. These are all considered forms of distracted driving."

But it's cellphone use that's illegal here. And, as the Boston-area study suggests, it's not cell phones in cars that kill people -- it's people and their selfish, dangerous attitudes.

That doesn't mean we don't need a law banning cellphone use in cars.

What's missing is more common sense and, of course, more enforcement and even stiffer penalties. That still might not make a difference in the overall numbers of accidents each year, but it will make me feel better. And, down the road, it may do what no study can determine.

Save the life of someone you love.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Crashes were already down

DESPITE the increase in the number of drivers and the use of cellphones, the number of traffic collisions in the province has decreased in Manitoba over the last decade. Here are the numbers:

Year / Collisions / Active drivers

2010*   27,172  767,222

2009  26,578  754,485

2008   29,092  744,049

2007   29,494  728,047

2006  31,738  703,051

2005   33,164  695,091

2004  35,002  690,568

2003  34,771  683,060

2002  31,983  679,219

2001  30,999  674,921

* The banning of hand-held devices in Manitoba came into law in May 2010

-- source: Manitoba Public Insurance

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 28, 2012 B1