Cellphone Bans

Recently a cab driver ordered two passengers out of his taxi, refusing to continue conveying them to their destination.  They had exhibited the effrontery of asking that he cease using his cellphone while he was driving.  Their request of him to obey the law and ensure that he respected their safe passage to their destination, infuriated the cab driver.  He simply refused to continue driving them.

The two passengers reported what had occurred and it splashed its way onto the news.  Cellphone use while driving has been legislated against in a good many communities.  There are Canadian provincial laws and state laws in the United States making it illegal to use a cellphone while driving.  It is an obvious distraction.  Among many other distractions that customarily take drivers' minds off the road.

Cellphone use is an obvious, pervasive and difficult habit to break people of, despite the laws ensuring a hefty fine if caught while driving with a cellphone in use.  People just tend to do surreptitiously what they had formerly done out in the open.  Habits are hard to break.  And people don't like what they take to be their freedoms being interfered with, even when it's done for a good reason.

Everyone may agree that it isn't a good idea to be distracted while driving, that speaking or texting on a cellphone is definitely distracting, but it's the other fellow who can't do both with ease, not themselves.  Its use seems to be irresistible to people.  And, despite the laws, they simply keep on speaking and driving, texting and manoeuvring in traffic.

Strangely enough, new statistics seem to indicate that with the ban of cellphone use while driving, accident rates have increased, not decreased.  Oddly enough the number of highway traffic deaths attributed to alcohol, drugs and speed decreased between 2009 and 2010.  While accidents caused by the use of cellphones are on the increase.

Studies conducted both in the United States and Canada found support of those statistics; accidents caused by alcohol, drugs and speed down, those caused by cellphone distraction up.  A 2010 analysis sponsored for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found collisions in four states with cellphone bans increased between 1% and 9% over states where cellphones were allowed use behind the wheel.

Among people aged 18 to 24, 45% simply ignored the bans completely.  They continued to use their handheld cellphones but tried to screen what they were doing, holding the cellphones at a lower level that couldn't be seen from the outside of the vehicle, and that meant taking their eyes off the road more consistently.

Cellphone bans saw people using their devices below the windshield, for privacy.  The end result was more distracted-driving-related accidents.