Is NH's Hands-Free Law Working? - Granite Grok

Is NH’s Hands-Free Law Working?

distracted-drivers-infographic
Distracted driving is a factor in 80% of crashes, Just not in New Hampshire, maybe.

A day before the one-year anniversary of the “Hands-Free Law” the NH Union Leader reported an increase in collisions and deaths on New Hampshire roads. Three days later the Nashua Telegraph posted a report titled “NH sees fewer road deaths since law took effect in 2015.”

The Hands-Free law prohibits the handling of portable electronic devices by the drivers of motor vehicles. The law is meant to reduce collisions and fatal accidents by prohibiting people from the devil of distraction. So has it made things better or has it made things worse?

The headline from the Telegraph article suggests improvement. “NH sees fewer road deaths since law took effect.” But if you take the time to read the article there is nothing definitive to suggest that is true. We get supposition and hearsay with a side of speculation (just like before the law was passed), along with concerns about dangerous side-effects of the law which we’ll get to momentarily.

So has New Hampshire seen fewer road deaths “since law took effect“? No.

Crash and fatality data obtained from the New Hampshire Department of Safety (DoS) show no meaningful improvement in the number of fatal accidents, deaths, or even non-fatal-collisions through the end of 2015.

 

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Fatal Crashes 120 84 101 124 89 103
Resulting Fatalaties 128 90 108 135 95 114
Non-Fatal Crashes 32157 32373 31549 29984 28395 29605

 

I know, the law went into effect on July 1, 2015, so how can we make any assumptions without additional details? Thanks to the linked Newspaper articles above we have what we need.

Using the data provided by the DoS and the details reported to the Union Leader and the Telegraph (comparing the first six months of 2015 to the first half of 2016) we can calculate the full 12-month period of data during which the hands-free law has been in force.

 

2015.1 2015.2 *2016 12mo
Fatal Crashes *35 *68 55 123
Resulting Fatalaties *38 *76 58 134

 

2015.1 is the first six months of 2015, backfilled from details provided here.

2015.2 is the balance after subtracting the first six months from the 2015 totals.

The *2016 figures are from the UL article. The result is a “twelve-month total” from July 1, 2016 to June 26, 2016.

Those numbers are nearly identical to the 2013 numbers for fatal crashes and deaths. The highest year for both since 2010.

Is it conclusive?

There are scores of possible factors involved in both fatal and non-fatal crashes. But if cell phone use while driving was truly the evil root of such things, and legislation was enacted to relieve us of this scourge, you’d expect there to be signs of improvement.

The Nashua Telegraph article hints at improvement but won’t commit.

Distracted driving had ranked as the second- or third-leading cause of New Hampshire road deaths for the prior 19 years, said Capt. Matthew Shapiro, highway safety commander for the New Hampshire State Police.

It dropped to sixth place in 2015 and is responsible for just one death – or about 2 percent of the total 55 road deaths through June 19 this year, according to Roberta Emmons, business systems analyst at the Department of Safety.

While the data is too preliminary to draw conclusions, Department of Safety officials say the numbers are promising.

I see nothing promising and no reason to commit because I do not believe we’ve seen any improvement in distracted driving.

It is my ‘expert’ opinion (and I drove professionally for many years) that nearly every crash can be tied to some form of distraction. Nothing ‘comes out of nowhere.’ Accidents happen because drivers focus on something, even momentarily, other than driving. That is distracted driving.

People who take the responsibility of driving seriously avoid accidents because they put driving ahead of everything else. They change their behavior relative to the conditions of the road, the traffic, drivers around them, the vehicle’s operating condition, occupants, and their own known limitations including an awareness of what will distract them. They pay attention to details.

When you fail to pay attention to the details of driving you are distracted. Accidents that could have been avoided but were not are a product of that distraction. This includes hitting things and getting hit by them.

So when representatives of public safety suggest that the number of collisions resulting from ‘distracted driving’ declined, I refuse to believe them. I disbelieve because human nature is the root cause of this ailment and legislators, no matter how gifted they may find themselves to be, cannot take that away.

We have data from states that have had hands-free laws long enough to realise this truth.

Peer reviewed research confirms it.

So we know they do not do much more than incovneince people at the expense of a few. But what if we could also demonstrtate that these laws may make matters worse, which, despite the misleading headline, the Nashua Telegraph reported.

“In my opinion, where people before were holding the phone up on the steering wheel so they could … see what they are doing, now they are holding it on their lap so it is not visible to police, which is more dangerous because now they are looking down at their lap,” Nashua Police Officer Sean Mabry said last week.

It’s part of the reason why law-enforcers have mixed reviews about how well the stricter hands-free driving law is working since it took effect July 1, 2015.

Many of the reactions to my own article reported massive disobedience by the public as well, but of a more blatant variety, openly using devices while driving. So legions of operators are using devices in a manner that removes their eyes even further from the road than before the law went into effect.

The result of that legislated change in behavior could result in more crashes and deaths.

So what do we know?

There has been no reduction in motor-vehicle crashes, fatal crashes, or fatalities.

While not conclusive, the 12-month trend since implementation suggests as many or more collisions, fatal crashes, and deaths, and that the trend could continue through the end of 2016.

A significant number of people ignore the law, and are engaging in more dangerous behavior to subvert it; the ‘experts’ and the general population know this.

The research continues to demonstrate that hands-free laws do not produce any meaningful results.

The Federal government and it’s various PR arms continue to insist that distracted driving is a factor in 80% of all collisions.

The New Hampshire Department of Safety thinks the numbers are promising, but law enforcement has mixed reviews about how well the stricter hands-free driving law is working.

Capt. Matthew Shapiro, highway safety commander for the New Hampshire State Police, or perhaps it is Roberta Emmons, report that distracted driving accidents are in decline.

So, are distraction-related accidents going down at all in the Granite State? If you’d like a hint at how that might be possible despite everything we know, not that long ago, New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch made it a priority of his administration to reduce the number of public School drop-outs. To accomplish this goal, he redefined what a dropout was.  The Department of Education and the regulatoy bodies changed the name, came up with a new scheme for sorting them, and the numbers magically plummeted to near zero.

We didn’t actually reduce anything but when the agencies that are affected or stand to benefit are tasked with the reporting…

As for the Hands-Free law, we’ve got it on good advice from citizens and law enforcement alike that the law created behaviors more dangerous than before the legislation passed. The numbers to date support an absence of improvement and the potentital for matters being worse.

New Hampshire’s Hands-Free law has not made driving in the Granite State safer and it may have made it more dangerous.

 

(Adapted and edited from the original, posted at NewHampshire Political Buzz.org)

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