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Citation |
IIHS Highway Loss Data Institute. Highw. Loss Data Inst. Bull. 2009; 26(17): online. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2009, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) |
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DOI |
unavailable |
PMID |
unavailable |
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Abstract |
Cellphone use in the United States has grown quickly during the past decade. According to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (2009), cellphone subscribers increased 42 percent between 2005 and 2009. Minutes of use surged from 195 billion in June 2000 to more than 1.1 trillion in June 2008. There is growing public concern about the contribution of cellphone use and/or text messaging to distracted driving. A number of jurisdictions worldwide, including several US states, have made it illegal to use hand-held cellphones while driving. Evidence on the effectiveness of these bans is mixed. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has studied driver response to three of the statewide bans on hand-held phone use (McCartt and Geary, 2004; McCartt and Hellinga, 2007; McCartt et al., in press). In November 2001, New York became the first state to implement a ban on hand-held cellphone use for drivers, and driver phone use immediately declined by an estimated 47 percent. The District of Columbia passed a ban in 2004, and driver cellphone use dropped 41 percent. Connecticut's ban took effect in 2005, and hand-held phone use declined by an estimated 76 percent. The estimated effects of these three cellphone laws differ considerably, but results indicate that banning hand-held cellphone phone use can affect phone use. The purpose of this Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) bulletin was to examine state level automobile insurance collision claim frequencies to determine if the reduction in hand-held cellphone use was accompanied by measurable changes in claim frequency after enactment of cellphone bans. Trends for Connecticut, New York, and the District of Columbia were examined because IIHS has documented that hand-held cellphone use decreased after these jurisdictions enacted bans. California also is included in the analysis because it is a large state and its ban is fairly recent. Insurance collision loss experience does not indicate a decrease in crash risk when hand-held cellphone laws are enacted. Crashes in this bulletin included all collision claims reported to HLDI, whereas ideally crashes would have been restricted to claims involving driving while using hand-held cellphones. This information is not known to HLDI, nor to the insurance companies that supply data to HLDI, and is a clear limitation of the analysis. However, prior estimates of the effects of cellphone use on crash risk were so large, and reductions in observed hand-held cellphone use following the laws were so substantial, that reductions even in aggregate crashes would be expected after enactment of hand-held cellphone laws. Data presented in this bulletin indicate that, during a time of large growth in the purchase of cellphones and in the use of these phones, collision claim rates either were flat or already decreasing before enactment of the laws. Claim frequencies for control states without laws also were declining and generally continued to trend in the same way as claim frequencies for the study states after the laws. There is no evidence that bans on hand-held cellphone use by drivers has affected these trends in collision claims. Available: Language: en |