More Evidence on the Failings of Distracted Driving Laws

My latest Calgary Herald column looks at the latest evidence on the ineffectiveness of distracted driving laws, and what it tells us about bad policy and government promises:

While there's often an expectation on government to devise a policy to address a certain problem, the mere creation of the policy does not mean the problem has been solved.   Were that the case, the distinction between good and bad policy would be meaningless.
One can therefore oppose a specific policy and still share the concern about the problem that the policy is ostensibly designed to fix.   That may seem reasonable on paper, but it is not always recognized in practice. Often, opponents of a policy are accused of being indifferent to the problem, or even opposed to it being solved.
For example, a desire to reduce gun-related homicides was the impetus for creating the national long-gun registry. However, a study published last October in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence demonstrated quite conclusively that the registry had no significant bearing on Canada's homicide rate.
Despite those findings, there was - and continues to be - much maligning of gun registry opponents and their purported intransigence to taking steps to save lives.
Here in Alberta, we saw something similar with the debate around Bill 16, the government's so-called solution to the problem of distracted driving. The law passed in November 2010 and officially took effect in September 2011.
Many legitimate questions were raised about the failings of similar laws elsewhere and the absurd provisions of Bill 16 (for example, texting or talking in a drive-thru lineup or while stopped at a train crossing constitute distracted driving), but the government merely declared that it was "making roads safer," and therefore opponents of the bill were obstacles to that end.
We've not yet reached a full year of the law being in effect, but already we have evidence pointing to its failings.
Calgary police report that the number of distracted driving tickets they are issuing continues to rise.  That might be considered a success if the goal is to raise revenue, but it is hardly something to celebrate if the goal is to change behaviours and make roads safer. Last October, 416 tickets were issued. The number dropped the following month, but was back up to 529 for April.
And while it's still early days here in Alberta, a new review of the experience in Manitoba thus far gives us even more cause for concern.
Manitoba's distracted driving law took effect in the middle of 2010, so there's now more than a full year of data to examine, which is exactly what a new study from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy does.
The report finds that highway collisions in 2011 had increased to above the total for 2009, despite the fact that highway crashes involving speed and alcohol decreased during that time.
These results would appear to confirm what other studies have found about the ineffectiveness of distracted driving laws.
Earlier this year, the Swedish National Road and Transport Institute concluded in a report done for the Swedish government that there is no basis for a legislated ban.   Last year, the Governors Highway Safety Association in the U.S. released a study that analyzed more than 350 scientific papers on distracted driving. They found that there is really no evidence suggesting these bans actually work. The association is now urging states to hold off on such laws.
A study released in 2010 by the U.S. Highway Loss Data Institute found that states with cellphone bans saw no decrease in crashes compared to states with no bans. Another study found the same for states with bans on texting while driving - three of the four states with such bans actually saw increases in crashes among young drivers.
Researchers suspect drivers are holding their devices low to avoid detection, therefore making their behaviour even more dangerous.
None of this is to suggest that people should be texting while driving, or that there aren't ways of discouraging such behaviour.   Rather, it's an illustration of how empty political assurances are without evidence to back them up. Simply declaring you're going to make the roads safer does not automatically mean that you are.
It's something to bear in mind as the government's new impaired driving law begins taking effect - a law sold to Albertans with similar unequivocal assurances.