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Banning cellphones in cars is a sop to safety nannies and soccer-mom voters

Bans on using cellphones while driving are largely useless for two reasons: First, they never prohibit hands-free phone devices, despite studies showing that hands-free chatting in cars is as risky as the hand-held variety. But mostly, the bans don’t work because drivers ignore them. We’re a mobile culture. We’re committed to using our phones while we drive. We’ve come to count on making a couple of quick calls on the way home from the office, or dialling up our kids to make sure they’re ready to be picked up from school or their swim lessons, and no law is going to dissuade us.
During February, RCMP officers throughout B.C. issued nearly 4,500 distracteddriving tickets to motorists caught talking or texting on handheld cellphones. That’s up from 2,300 in the same month last year.
In American jurisdictions that have banned cellphones behind the wheel since 2000, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety researchers have discovered a predictable pattern: With awareness of, and publicity for, the new law, there is an initial drop in phoning-while-driving — slight, but statistically significant — yet within 18 to 24 months, cellphone use in cars returns to pre-ban levels.
In any event, these laws are primarily sops to safety nannies and soccer-mom voters. They are seldom evidencebased. They are unwarranted intrusions on personal liberty because they have no proven public benefit. And they have little or no impact on accident statistics.
Just how ridiculous and arbitrary the bans are is well illustrated in Ontario. There, drivers using hands-free devices may press buttons to answer calls and hang up, but they may not use their handheld phones’ speaker functions (which requires no more touches or concentration) because, of course, then they would be using a handheld phone while driving.
In Alberta, which last fall brought in a distracted driving law similar to B.C.’S, drivers are permitted to eat and to drink non-alcoholic beverages while driving, but they are cautioned to set their car’s or truck’s radio and heater/ air conditioner before backing out of their driveways, since adjusting their tunes or the temperature inside their vehicles while operating them on a public thoroughfare could earn them a ticket. Imagine the ridiculousness of that.

Nearly all the research done on driver distractions indicates that most of the major distractions present roughly equal risks — and government can’t ban them all (unless police officers are prepared to give parents a tickets for driving with a shrieking child). Any law that singles out only one, such as handheld cells, is not a serious attempt to make roads safer. It represents nothing but an attempt by authorities to make themselves, and safety-obsessed citizens, feel better.