Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010

Do cell phones cause wrecks?

For a lot of years, legislators have filed bills in the North Carolina General Assembly to ban all drivers from using cell phones.

For a lot of years, those bills have gone nowhere.

Now officials in Chapel Hill are considering carving out their own town-wide ban to prevent people from yakking on cell phones while driving.

It might turn into a bigger undertaking than they imagine.

The most immediate question town officials will face, if they decide to move forward with a ban, is whether they can do so with a town ordinance or will require the General Assembly to pass local legislation.

The issue is a bit muddled, but without local legislation, the town might see offenders challenging its authority. Putting the issue before the legislature could mean another problem -- an all-out debate on whether the state, or any part of it, should ban cell phone use by drivers.

The General Assembly typically passes local bills without much debate so long as legislators from the area affected agree with the legislation. Don't expect the same when it comes to a cell-phone ban.

Last year, the legislature banned texting while driving. A couple of years earlier, legislators barred new drivers -- those under age 18 -- from driving while using a cell phone.

But bills calling for cell-phone bans for all drivers are usually dispatched without so much as a committee hearing. That most people, either occasionally or often, practice the art of driving while cell-phone chatting might have something to do with the lack of legislative success.

Traffic-safety advocates argue that cell-phone use increases the likelihood of accidents. In response, six states have banned the use of handheld cell-phones by drivers.

Those arguments, though, inevitably lead to questions about all types of distracted driving. If cell phones, why not ban eating in cars? And what about those annoying drivers who can't seem to keep their eyes on the road because of the stream of babble directed at a hapless passenger?

The claims about accidents also deserve tough scrutiny.

In reality, as the use of cell phones in American society has exploded, traffic accidents, traffic-related injuries and traffic-related deaths have declined.

In 2007, there were 6,024,000 police-reported car collisions causing injury or property damage in the United States, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 1990, the number was 6,471,000. Car accidents dropped despite rises in population, licensed drivers, registered vehicles and vehicle miles driven.

Fatalities have declined from 1.73 per 100 million miles driven in 1994 to 1.27 per 100 million miles driven in 2008. Non-fatal injuries per vehicle mile driven are nearly half today what they were in 1988.

Those figures can be explained in a lot of ways. Safer cars, increased seat-belt use and tougher drunken-driving laws are all factors.

But no matter the explanation, the numbers don't jibe very well with notions that cell phones have made our roads markedly less safe.