HB 546 would ban cell phone use in your vehicle while driving. But is that the actual problem? Up until we had Ray LaHood the phone-o-phobe running the NHTSA from the department of Transportation most of the data indicated that talking on a cell phone was no less dangerous than having a conversation in the vehicle with another person. As of this writing, you can’t find that data anymore. In fact the NHTSA and the government have a dedicated web site to distracted driving that highlights cell phones as a major cause of driver distraction and even Oprah is in on the action, but that tidbit appears to be missing.
Suspicious? You should be.
Looking at the large picture cell phones have become the bogeyman equivalent of CO2. The Democrats and their green $pecial intere$t friend$ say CO2 is making the planet hotter but despite there being millions more tons of it about it hasn’t gotten warmer. It has gotten cooler. And rich liberals keep buying up expensive ocean front property despite dire warnings of rising sea-levels. Insurance scam or hypocrisy?
So what’s the deal with cell phones?
The number of phones in service has exploded to the point where there are almost as many in use as there are people to use them. So there are far more of them in use, and in use in vehicles, so by all accounts we should see an increase in distractions, collisions and deaths.
We see exactly the opposite.
There has been a decades long decreases with collisions and fatalities at historic lows despite more vehicles, drivers, and miles traveled. And since 2008 we have managed to keep fatalities under 40,000 per year, which seemed like an impossible dream. The numbers have declined with recent estimates approaching the mid thirty-thousand range. (Or maybe the Department of Labor is calculating these statistics now?)
Fewer collisions, and fewer deaths despite adding millions of cell phones into the population?
We could just as easily argue that by redirecting all the other common driving distractions to the use of cell phones we managed to prevent 800,000 collisions and save over 10,000 lives.
But no one is looking at those statistics. Cell phones have become the obvious scape-goat, a high profile observation for what appears to be a declining problem. A torches and pitchforks moment where the mob-ocracy chases down a "monster."
Banning cell phones is a nanny-state, look what I did mom, act performed by shallow uninterested legislators who are more interested in the appearance of doing something memorable with their political careers rather than something necessary and useful.
HB546 will not help unless you also ban conversation, passengers, eating, smoking, adjusting the heater or radio, moving your mirrors, looking at scenery or just about everything else that a human being does or that can happen in the passenger compartment of a motor vehicle.
It also ignores reality. The three things that cause the most vehicle accidents and deaths today are the same things that caused them 30 years ago–speeding, alcohol, and teenagers.
But we are not about to ban teenage drivers, even if it is their number one cause of death and represents a huge imbalance in the cost of life and public safety resources to deal with the collisions and tragedies. With speed and alcohol still major factors in the teenage crash statistics relationship.
So we don’t need another do-gooder bill like HB 546. We need a systematic change in the driving culture. But that’s not necessarily something I would want my legislature to attempt. So rather than turn police officers into a broader revenue stream by passing some pointless bill, why not just try educating the public instead? It seems to have worked for seat belts in NH, it can work for cell phones as well.
