RALEIGH – My guess is that there are some disappointed and frustrated people right now in the North Carolina General Assembly and elsewhere. They’ve been rooting for years now for legislation proposed by Rep. Mary McAllister, a Fayetteville Democrat, that would ban the use of hand-held cell phones by motorists. But on Tuesday, the bill failed to get a favorable report from a House committee.
Were lawmakers just being cavalier about highway safety? Does the cell phone industry enjoy undue influence at the expense of the public interest?
The issue is actually a bit more complicated than that. McAllister and other proponents of the regulation cite studies such as a 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine to argue that cell phone use, by distracting drivers, increases the risk of traffic accidents. All other things being equal, it certainly seems reasonable to conclude that fumbling around with your cell, or engaging in a spirited phone conversation about your next appointment or your daughter’s curfew, might well create a distraction.
As a public-policy matter, however, that’s not the end of the story. All other things are not equal.
In theory, a state prohibition of cell phone use in a moving car could be justifiable. It would not be an act of paternalism, since the elevated risk applies to others as well as oneself, and it involves an elevated risk on a government highway, not on private property.
But there are several other points to consider. First, caution is warranted in interpreting the relevant research. As other analysts have pointed out, the available data are tricky to work with. And studies that seem to find a correlation between cell-phone use and accidents do not necessarily establish a causal relationship. People who are more likely to talk incessantly and animatedly on their phones may also be likely to engage in other distracting behaviors, such as fiddling with their stereos, eating, or talking with passengers. If not on the cell, it could well be that they will be distracted, anyway, reducing the expected benefit in safer driving from the prohibition. It’s also worth noting, contrary to my expectation, that it’s the conversation that distracts, not dialing, so allowing hand-free phones (as the bill does) would appear to render it ineffectual.
Second, these other behaviors are more common than phone use, according to a study for the AAA Foundation for Highway Safety by the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. Several lawmakers reinforced this point by offering amendments to ban eating while driving and the like. The point is clear: why target phone use when other distractions appear to be more frequent and more dangerous? Practically speaking, there is a limit to how much North Carolinians will allow their driving habits to be regulated.
Third, even with the use of cell phones, accident rates for individual drivers are not all that high. The argument may make some squeamish, but it is valid: highway safety is not infinitely valuable. If we could enforce it, setting a statewide speed limit of 30 miles per hour on all highways would likely reduce accidents and certainly would reduce traffic fatalities. Yet we’ll never see a serious effort to establish such a limit, because it would impose substantial costs, in time and money, on commercial motorists and commuters.
I could still be persuaded to favor McAllister’s idea. But I’m not there yet – and apparently I’m not alone.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.