By banning texting while driving, the Grand Forks City Council did the right thing. Short of sleeping while driving, almost nothing pulls a driver's attention off the road quite like reading and tapping out text messages.
That's why 30 states have banned the practice, and why as recently as Friday, Cincinnati joined the Ohio cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Columbus in passing its own ban. And U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood is an absolute bear on the subject, calling for devices that automatically shut down cell phones and BlackBerrys when a car's engine is started.
But there's one odd and unsettling note in all this furor: crash statistics. A study in February by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said it plain:
"Although increased rates of cellphone use while driving should be leading to increased crash rates, crash rates have been declining," the study concluded.
"Reasons for this paradox are unclear."
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Pay attention to a distracted-driving summit later this month in Washington, which may try to untie this knot.
The crash statistics are a paradox because the findings of other studies have been crystal clear. When drivers operate simulators while talking on cellphones or (especially) texting, their accident rates jump, several research teams have found. Such work also is the source of the now widely accepted finding that hands-free cell phones are just as distracting as hand-held models.
And the simulator findings have been confirmed on the road, or so it seems. A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute Study amassed by far the most persuasive evidence. The institute put sophisticated cameras and other instruments in participants' personal vehicles, then recorded what happened. The results: "Manual manipulation of phones such as dialing and texting of the cell phone led to a substantial increase in the risk of being involved in a safety-critical event (e.g., crash or near crash)," the institute reported.
"Text messaging on a cell phone was associated with the highest risk of all cell phone related tasks." In fact, the risk of a crash or near-crash for texting drivers was found to be 23 times higher than it was for non-distracted drivers, the institute reported.
That's solid science, and it underlies the recent push for banning texting while driving.
So why have crash rates been declining steadily since 1996, even during the years when more and more drivers started talking on cell phones?
"More research is needed," the Insurance Institute study concludes. In other words, no one really knows.
The U.S. Department of Transportation will convene its second national distracted driving summit on Sept. 21. Here's hoping the participants tackle this challenging paradox and work toward more definitive findings about drivers and cell-phone use.
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-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
