“Border collie jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune.” Those were the last words of Malibu plastic surgeon Frank Ryan, best known for “reconstructing” reality TV star Heidi Montag. It’s not quite up there with “Et tu, Brute?” Yet it seemed important enough for him to text it just before driving off a cliff in August. Jill survived.
We don’t know what the message was in a 2007 accident involving the sender and her four fellow New York high school cheerleaders. But it probably wasn’t worth slamming head-on into a truck, killing them all. And the 2008 Chatsworth train collision, in which 25 people died and more than 100 were injured, was officially attributed to the engineer of the Metrolink commuter train being distracted by text messaging.
As I write in my LA Times piece, “Texters, You’d Be Better off Driving Drunk,” we don’t know what the annual death toll is from texting but all the evidence is that it’s a growing killer:
- It’s more dangerous to text and drive than to drink and drive.
- Most people say they do it and the number of text messages just keeps on increasing.
- Texting is 17 times more dangerous than simply talking on a cell phone, and the number of deaths from that was estimated at 2,300 a year before texting caught on.
- Texting is clearly addictive for many people, and as unfortunately know from personal experience with a loved one addicts will die — and kill — to sustain their habits.
- At the same time I show that all the state bans on driving and cell phone usage are essentially worthless because they target the wrong cause of accidents. It’s not taking your eyes off the road, but your brain.
- Finally, laws against texting are enforceable.
Is there a libertarian argument against more active law enforcement in these areas? As Gabriel Roth has pointed out, if officials were really concerned about auto safety, they’d start by rolling back regulations that make cars less safe and allowing for insurers to test and certify vehicles and drivers. What do you think?
The Obama administration, having succeeded in bringing about economic recovery and having nation-built a democratic Afghanistan, has set its sights on another pressing issue: driving while distracted. Today in Washington, the Department of Transportation is holding its second annual Distracted Driving Summit. This meeting of the minds brings together finger-waving bureaucrats and activists from across the country to devise strategies on how to make another molehill into a mountain. They even have a website, Distraction.gov, which instructs lowly citizen visitors to “Become a fan of [Transportation] Secretary [Ray] LaHood [on Facebook]” (which, of course, I did).
LaHood is currently waging a war on “texting while driving,” as many cities and states continue to ban holding phones behind the wheel. But why the selective hysteria over texting and hand-held cell phones? Research suggests that drivers using hands-free devices are no safer than those using hand-held devices, yet I have heard no calls to prohibit hands-free devices — not to mention fiddling with the stereo or yelling at your kids in the backseat or listening to NPR’s awful cringe-fest “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!,” which are also potentially deadly distractions.
These laws, which have little effect on actual human behavior (particularly among high-risk demographics) given that they are so difficult to enforce, have little basis in reality. Despite the fact that many drivers ignore these laws, distracted driving deaths fell this past year. LaHood and his cronies have no doubt taken credit, despite there being no evidence to support their shameless high-fiving.
The Independent Institute’s transportation guru Gabriel Roth (editor of the indispensable volume on creative, market-based transportation solutions Street Smart) suggests that focusing on distracted driving is a way for transportation officials to avoid addressing real problems because, well, they are the problem.
CEI has long noted that, as they continue to be ratcheted up, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards will continue to kill thousands of drivers by putting them into smaller, lighter, less-safe cars. Yet because The Environment is spared a trivial amount of damage, that’s okay. A government monopoly over the roads preempts the market-based solution — insurance testing and certification, just like they often do in the shipping industry — with inefficient, expensive, poorly enforced government mandates. Yet this is okay because it keeps politicians and bureaucrats such as LaHood perpetually employed.
Rather than holding summits and engineering new nanny state policies, regulators and their cheerleaders should focus on rolling back deadly and perverse government mandates.
Many, if not all, people depend on government employees to be positive role models for their children. They can give kids something to which to aspire; to show what they can be if they only work hard and stay in school. To give us all a walking, talking example of a life well lived.
It is in that spirit that Executive Order No. 13513 prohibits federal employees and contractors from texting while driving while on duty.
As the Order reminds us, “With nearly 3 million civilian employees, the Federal Government can and should demonstrate leadership in reducing the dangers of text messaging while driving.”The texting-while driving ban will “set an example for State and local governments, private employers, and individual drivers.”
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