The News-Gazette reported on 9/2/2007 that the pedestrian /car crash rate for the area has been steady at one a week for about the past 5 years, with 242 injuries, 10 fatalities. Nationally, one in 5 pedestrian deaths is from a hit and run. We cannot know how many of these relate to cell-phone usage, but it is likely that some do as 1 in ten drivers is talking on a cell phone. The 100 car study found that the majority of the distractions leading to accidents, near accidents, and incidents come from cell phones or related hand held devices. There is no reason why any accidents in Urbana need to have cell-phone usage as a factor. The cost of banning cell-phone driving doesn’t even rise to the level of an inconvenience or loss of freedom; it is a change of habit and nothing more. Dial before you put your car in gear, not after. Answer your phone after you get home or to the office, or pull off the road, there’s no need to answer a phone while navigating a 2-ton vehicle through streets and signals - that's what voice mail and caller id are for! The benefit of such a ban goes beyond the accidents prevented to the increased awareness that driving is a serious task, and impaired driving is not acceptable. Let’s suppose that the marginal benefit were really small—maybe one less disabled body, one less child lost in 5 years, can we honestly say the marginal cost is too high? The few minutes of time saved by trying to talk and drive are not worth sacrificing safety. Even the trivial benefits of avoiding minor accidents are obvious, and well, avoiding a death is huge. After all, we ban the use of cell phones by bus drivers and the very young, we regulate the driving of the elderly, we require seat belts, and so on, all to reduce the OVERALL incidence of accidents and death. This ordinance will put Urbana at the forefront of the nation.
I'm not sure how much more proof will be sufficient to answer some objectors. For years the tobacco industry fought the link between smoking and cancer yet today we ban smoking in public places in this state as do other states and countries. Should we not take action on global warming because there are those that aren't convinced by the existing evidence? Let me assure you that the information on seat belt usage was known years before the FHWA demanded nationwide compliance. Politics is a very serious aspect of any federal agency's action. The comparisons from the study simulations are very clear in their comparison to the .08 BAC level which is now considered the de facto standard limit for breaking the law for DUI and so on. There are now multiple studies of cell phone usage with various populations that all come in at about this level: the Australian study found no differences in the rate of accidents between gender, age, and hand-held versus hands-free (it was necessary to do it there because our telephone companies wouldn't release the records of cell-phone usage even when given permission to do so by users - the study was sponsored by an American non-profit, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety), the simulation studies done at the Univ. of Illinois and at Utah, the Virginia Tech Transportation study, and the 100 car study. I remember when it was a higher level that we considered to be too impaired to drive. So, if .08 BAC is too impaired to drive by law (though some would argue that many can probably drive perfectly fine at this level) and cell phones have this similar level of impairment, then it follows that driving while using a cell phone should be considered equally inadvisable. No doubt, there are cell phone users that can simultaneously drive effectively though it has now been shown, using brain imaging, that listening on a cell phone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving (Carnegie-Mellon). It took the FHWA a long time to support seat belts and other safety measures in cars. In fact, they haven't done enough in spite of evidence to the contrary. My mother in law was killed because the car she was driving had no side body impact protection. Why isn't this required of all vehicles when we know it will save lives? ? There are serious political and interested money type lobbies involved here!
Another difference is that in addition to being able to move from impaired to sober by shutting off your phone, many people are far more than .08 when they start driving "drunk" and they can't sober up so that their total exposure is increased both by the level of BAC and by the duration of their driving distance or time. So sure, more deaths occur due to drunk driving than from cell phone use but an avoidable death is an avoidable death. We should be outraged that there are 43,000 deaths due to vehicles a year but since they occur almost as individual acts of God, we treat them differently than a plane/truck/terrorist event that takes out a few hundred or thousand. For that matter, we take tragedies due to natural disasters more seriously than those due vehicle deaths. Frankly, I would rather have my commercial airline pilot using a cell phone than my taxi driver because most modern commercial planes can basically fly themselves! When cars reach this level of sophistication (which is technically feasible), then sure, we can all go back to talking on our cell phones. In the meantime, we should do all we can to lower the death rate due to vehicles (which show pedestrians, bikes, and motorcycles at high risk).
It is strategically more effective to single out cell phone use as the 100 car study shows that the top distraction involved in crashes, near crashes and incidents are from cell phones (and related devices). The rest are distributed across a number of activities. None of these other activities would be considered an impairment because they don't take you consciously out of the act of driving. The fact that we are banning younger drivers is based on frequency of incidents but this also means that there are incidents across age groups. You don't magically turn 19 or 20 and become instantly perfect at driving while talking on a cell phone. Is a perceived lower death due to an older/experienced driver using a cell phone versus a higher death rate (over some time interval) from younger drivers a reason NOT to ban their use by older drivers too? We ban their use by bus drivers, we regulate the driving of the elderly, we require seat belts, and so on, all to reduce the OVERALL incidence of death. For seat belts, education campaigns AND enforcement campaigns have been needed to get their use to the high levels we see today. I would expect that the same thing would be true for cell phones. Focusing on cell phone use is the most effective strategy we can have as perfect elimination of all distractions cannot happen though reduction of a deliberate impairment is very possible.
If we follow state law and use the words “moving vehicle” in the proposed ordinance, bikes would be covered. However, where do you draw the line...should pedestrians be included? Bicyclists and pedestrians put themselves at risk while drivers of 2 ton vehicles put themselves, their passengers, and anyone around them at risk. Do you treat bikes on the road one way while on the sidewalk where they are "pedestrians" a different way? It's interesting that about 1/3rd of pedestrians that are killed by vehicles also happen to be over the BAC limit but do we tell people they can't walk drunk?
We have a myriad of laws on the books that are difficult to enforce, including seat belt laws. I don't see the difference between enforcing our current seat belt laws and enforcing a cell phone ban. Both can be hard to detect. Yet we have laws about using seat belts and a myriad of programs to encourage their use. Is this because the insurance industry saves money because of fewer lives lost and the lower injury rate saves them money? Is this because people got tired of paying for all the collateral costs even though in many cases, you save your own life by using a seat belt? The point is that seat belt and DUI laws are many times enforced after the fact. The penalties are assessed and modified based on finding a person driving without a seat belt or while intoxicated when stopped for other reasons or after having been in an accident. Wouldn't we do the same with cell phones? Right now there are no empirical statistics in the United States on cell phone involvement in accidents because we DON'T require any reporting. The best we have are the results from Australia which tend to agree with all of the other studies. There is no empirical evidence for a statement that I think a lot of States Attorneys would disagree with as to punishing drunk drivers. We hear about the sensational cases in the press, not all the ones that get dealt with properly.
This strikes me as a red herring though the ordinance proposed has a much higher penalty for accidents where the ordinance has been found to have been violated. Some states (and Illinois needs one) have laws on negligent homicide. There are laws such as improper lane usage that police officers could use now when a driver weaves down the road or turns into the wrong lane be they distracted or otherwise. And it's hard to see all the infractions that do occur because the police aren't everywhere. Most of the time, these don’t get enforced until an accident occurs. It would be nice if the police had time to monitor all distracted driving, but adding a generic category will not be as effective as zeroing in on the most common distraction that is also an impairment that has been proven with empirical data to increase the risk of a crash by 4 times.
There is a difference between being distracted and being deliberately impaired that needs to be made. Using a cell phone while driving is impairment, eating food in your car is a distraction. We have to be sensible on where to draw the line and I draw the line at active technologies such as cell phones and text messaging (GPS systems would be considered passive as would other forms of guidance and automation systems). I would also agree that education efforts at pointing out how certain activities in the car can be dangerous are a good thing to be doing and should have long term beneficial effects. However, I find it ironic that we ban the use of headphones while driving and yet we aren't willing to consider that cell phones are a bigger danger. Our laws attach serious consequences to driving under the influence - impaired driving. The point of a cell phone ban is that when one drives while talking on a cell phone one has chosen to drive impaired and so our laws should consistently reflect the consequences when something bad happens.