Posted on 02/03/2010 6:07:24 AM PST by wrrock
Does the mere act of passing a law prohibiting texting while driving lower accidents? Surprise, surprise. A study shows bans on texting while driving doesn't really lower collision claims.
This survey looked at states passing texting bans and compared them to surrounding states. They found no significant difference in collision claims.
(Excerpt) Read more at cardealerreviews.org ...
Because other multi-tasking is just as dangerous. Including ANY use of a mobile device.
Well, people continue to do all sorts of stupid things behind the wheel and do we really know if the law actually stopped people from continuing to text while driving?
I don’t care what the study says. All one needs is an ounce of comman sense to know that texting while driving is very dangerous.
To text, you need to take your eyes off the road, at least one hand (often both) off the steering wheel, and have your mental attention divided.
If claims have not declined, it could be a result of the popularity of texting continuing to increase, resulting in either no change or a rise in the amount of texting while driving. IOW, people are breaking the laws against texting while driving.
This just means that, despite the laws, people are continuing to text while driving...and basically cause the same amount of accidents as before.
Radios, CD and tape players, heat and a/c controls, etc. Not to mention crying children, applying makeup, eating and drinking, etc. I find it ridiculous that cell phones are the only target of those who want to police people’s behavior in cars.
The comment here is the same as for the H1N1 thread.
We are often scared by the uncommon while we accept the common. I’ve been in auto insurance most of my life, 14 years setting up loss prevention programs on behalf of insurance companies and 30 years in IT looking at their databases. In the databases we can look at claims for a specific state or locale and for a specific time period. We can look at the frequency of claims, and the severity of the claim in terms of dollars and injury/death.
So consider the statistics for each of the following:
Auto design
to prevent a crash: ABS brakes, etc
to make a replacement part/repair cheaper.
to reduce the severity of injury/death: air bags, seatbelts
defects such as the current Toyota gas pedal
Maintenance
Worn tires, bad alignment, etc
Broken front or rear lights, etc
Dirty windshield, mud flaps, etc
Environment
street lights
highway design
highway materials, cement, asphalt, etc
highway maintenance, potholses, etc
Laws, education, peer pressure to change behavior
DUI
Cell phones
Texting
GPS
Reading newspapers, books, putt on makeup, etc
Distraction by child or adult passenger
Distraction by gaper block
blinded by high beams of other car, etc.
Driver Ed classes
Using the same methodology that shows ABS brakes, vehicle maintenance, highway design and DUI enforcement have the highest benefit we see that seat belts have no measureable benefit when actually looking at the raw data in the database and not at the PR of the company that feels peer pressure to say what is politically correct.
The main role of seatbelts is to remind you that the government/collective society is in control of your body and responsible for you and that you are not responsible for yourself.
The number of accidents did not decline because texting probably does not contribute significantly to the overall number of accidents. No doubt it is dangerous to do and some crashes are probably caused by people doing it, but these were just more nanny state laws.
I’ve followed people who were weaving all over the road while texting. These idiots don’t even keep up with traffic in slow rush hours times. I’m glad it’s outlawed.
Dialing, searching, adjusting, scrolling, reading, playing games....leave the damn cell phone alone.
It makes people LOOK AROUND to see if others (mostly cops) are watching them text.
Yet another distraction.
Seem like it doesn't make a lot of difference,
I don’t have stats at my finger tips at the moment.
Historically the states with the weakest seatbelt laws and the weakestenforcement of them had the lowest crash rates and lowest claims$/injury/death rates.
Back int he 90s I participated in collecting stats by local police enforcement based on number of tickets, warnings, etc. There was no correlation between seat belt enforcement and $/injury/death.
But the PR machines of everyone from police agencies seeking extra $ (good overtime for our men in blue) to Insurance company PR to Federal agencies to the MSM clouds the stats.
A good example is the AP that printed verbatim a press release of an agency with a vested interest in the stats.
The AP headline said “Seatbelts save 2,000 lives”. The frontpage article then went paragraph by paragraph. First stated was that traffic deaths declined by 2,000. The biggest category of decline was pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. So how do seat belts fit in there?
Then paragraphs told glowing tales of how better highway construction saved x hundred of lives and ABS brakes saved x hundred of lives and DUI enforcement saved x hundred of lives. And demographics of boomers getting older. And other factors. All of that can be verified and is true.
Finally, the front page headline and story was “continued on page 43” near the obits. One of the paragraphs near the end, and the final paragraph that drew conclusions stated that seatbelts saved 2,000 lives. Unlike the paragraphs on highway construction, ABS brakes, etc, they offered no supporting evidence for those seat belt statements. They had just been thrown in to make the politically correct feel good.
It’s all gone downhill since they started putting radios in cars in the thirties.
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