NH State Police Claim: Distracted Driving Deaths Down Thanks To Phone Ban Law, But Are They? - Granite Grok

NH State Police Claim: Distracted Driving Deaths Down Thanks To Phone Ban Law, But Are They?

A message on a Department of Transportation sign on Route 101 west in Auburn warns drivers of enforcement of the hands-free law. (DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER)
A message on a Department of Transportation sign on Route 101 west in Auburn warns drivers of enforcement of the hands-free law. (DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER)

Every summer we get an update on what a great idea the cell phone ban law was for New Hampshire. This year, it started at NHPR, with Major Matt Shapiro of the New Hampshire State Police.

Major Matt Shapiro of the New Hampshire State Police was one of the leaders behind this law, aimed at getting drivers’ eyes away from their phones and on the road.  Speaking on The Exchange, Shapiro says there is clear evidence it’s working. 

In an updated report, the same article with one more paragraph added,  “According to Shapiro, there were two fatal crashes related to distracted driving last year, down from 16 in 2014. However, overall traffic accidents and fatalities continue to remain high.”

Sorry, but I’m calling BS.

Every day the motoring public does their own analysis on how other drivers are responding to New Hampshire’s Hands-Free law. People are breaking that law every day. Drivers continue to use their cell phones or can be observed looking into their laps (because of that law). Everyone you talk to has stories, lots of them, about other drivers who look like they are texting while driving.

And sometimes it’s not just them.

There is also the matter of distraction in general. Once you remove things you can readily identify after the fact like drugs, alcohol, or a medical emergency, the exact nature of the accident or the distraction becomes increasingly subjective. Human error, distraction, operator error, and even fatigue can be documented, but short of an eye-witness or a survivor, there is only so much you can do to pinpoint the actual source of that distraction.

The point here is that claiming a reduction in vehicle-related deaths from a specific distraction to justify taking away everyone’s freedom is far too self-serving for a reasoned cynic to accept at face value.

Is this evidence that the mobile-device culture is beginning to see the light when it comes to distracted driving? Is it possible that New Hampshire only had two fatal accidents involving distraction?

Anyone who focuses even a sliver of their limited attention span on the issue will have a problem suspending disbelief.

The state of New Hampshire “reduced” dropout rates by renaming what a dropout was and labeling paths out of school in a way to favor the end goal of reporting fewer dropouts. But reporting fewer dropouts need have nothing to do with actually improving learning and education outcomes. In the case of New Hampshire, it did not. So how can anyone know that the State Police or any reporting authority aren’t just recording distraction-related fatalities so that they can claim with a straight face that “there were two fatal crashes related to distracted driving last year?”

To be honest, I have a hard time believing there were only 16 the year before.

The fact of the matter is that there’s no way to know. All we can do is look at the numbers, like I did last year, and compare that to the real world. And ask a lot of questions.

Major Shapiro admits that the number of accidents and deaths remain high.

What we don’t learn directly from the NHPR article is that in 2016, the year in which the Major claims only two distraction-related collisions that resulted in fatalities, there were more vehicle-related deaths that year than at any point in the entire decade.

Last year in New Hampshire there were 130 collisions with fatalities and 136 deaths.

Who among you, as observers in the world, believes for one second that New Hampshire had the highest number of accidents and fatalities over seven years and that at the same time deaths reported as a result of distraction plummeted–thanks to the hands- free law or any other act of government will?

To help you understand the problem in more detail, New Hampshire sorts fatalities by type as, Alcohol, Drugs, Human error/Distraction/Pedestrian error, Operator related/Centerline/Failure to Yield, Medical/Physical (fatigue & Medical), Speed, and other. Short of an unanticipated mechanical error, a heart attack or seizure, these are all related in one way or another to distraction.

But the State Police report that only two of those 130 collisions in 2016 were coded as due to distraction.

But why did they fail to yield? What was the source of the human error? What caused them to cross the centerline? Speed was a factor in the severity of the crash but what else caused the speeder to crash? Human error? Climate Change? Were they distracted? In the absence of the distraction might the other cause not have been a factor?

Again, we’ll never really know even after they tell us what we should know because where two or more factors meet, and one is more politically advantageous, human nature tells us what will happen.

We’ll tell ourselves we did the right thing passing the mobile device ban and that it works.

Did it?

Back around circa 2000, before the bureaucratic/legislative war on mobile devices, we’d find a National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) that believed most accidents were the result of distraction. An agency where speaking to an actual person in the car was deemed a greater distraction than talking to that same person on a cell phone.

Since then mob politics, fines and fees, and federal money have muddied the waters. Pressure from the feds and a little bit of “public outrage” result in the appearance of doing something. These bans also provide easy revenue when needed, cows to be milked for fees and fines, especially in a tourism-reliant state like New Hampshire. But do they reduce crashes and deaths or is this just a foil with fiscal benefits?

The NHTSA points to cell phone use as a major distraction leading to injury and death, but it also admits that isolating that as THE cause is difficult because of how police departments code distraction-related accidents and fatalities.

A problem that will become increasingly difficult as police departments under pressure from advocates and legislators feel the need to show evidence to justify how well laws or fines worked while the number of accidents and deaths refuse to cooperate.

And they won’t cooperate because of human nature.

Hands-free technology meant to replace handheld phones and that “culture” are no less of a distraction, according to the NHTSA.

Human nature strikes again.

Here in New Hampshire, the hand’s free law and its advocates assumed one thing about human behavior while ignoring others which may be why fatal accidents and deaths have spiked since the law passed. Last year was dismal. The year before the ban was a record low year for collisions and deaths. This year is on track to match 2016 but not to worry. The law is working. All those crashes and deaths are not due to distracted driving. That culture changing in New Hampshire.

That’s their story, and they are sticking to it.

 

>