From USA TODAY:
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood regularly refers to distracted driving as an “epidemic.” Toyota said last week it will spend $50 million on research into issues including distracted driving, a “growing cause of accidents.” And state legislators are racing to enact laws banning what they see as the culprit: text messaging and handheld cellphones.
Yet the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says there’s no evidence that distracted driving is leading to more crashes or that laws banning texting or handheld cells are having any effect, possibly because hands-free phones can be just as dangerous…
Although studies by IIHS and others show using a cellphone while driving quadruples the risk of a crash, IIHS research shows there was no concurrent increase in crashes as the number of cellphones increased throughout the 2000s. The institute is also studying how states “code” crash causes from police reports. Lund says it could be that changes in the numbers are due to more concern about distracted driving, rather than more distracted-driving crashes…
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