Research from Highway Loss Data Institute tells us what we already know: Change is slow
Much ado is being made this morning about an insurance industry study that purports to show that legal prohibitions against texting and driving are useless because they have not reduced automobile crashes.
According to the insurance group’s press release, its researchers “calculated rates of collision claims for vehicles up to 9 years old during the months immediately before and after driver texting was banned in California (January 2009), Louisiana (July 2008), Minnesota (August 2008), and Washington (January 2008).”
The conclusion? The laws haven’t worked.
Of course they haven’t. Why would anyone expect otherwise?
Don’t get me wrong. I favor these bans and believe they will help produce the desired results … eventually. But a year or two is but an instant when talking about behavioral change of this nature.
What makes me say that? Because I’m old enough to remember when smoking was as common as running water in restaurants and workplaces. I remember how long it took for that to change and I’m getting the sense that those who are so quick to dismiss the texting bans have forgotten.
Set the way-back machine: (Try not to quibble with the historical details; it’s all off the top of my head.)
In the beginning, everyone could smoke just about everywhere … and so they did.
Then a community – a Cambridge, Mass. or maybe a Berkeley, Calif. – decided to ban smoking in restaurants; second-hand smoke, Surgeon General’s report, all that stuff. These do-gooders were largely ridiculed as naïve; neither the dining public nor restaurant owners, we were told, would ever abide such a curb on such an ingrained habit. Bans are unenforceable People smoke while dining and working; they just do, so get over it.
But other bans and restrictions followed suit: more municipalities, more restaurants, more public places, and eventually, a workplace or three.
Each step of the way there were howls of protest and cocksure predictions of failure.
Slowly, very slowly, the voices of the naysayers gave way to something pretty remarkable: general acceptance, compliance by most … and clean air. No longer was smoking in public socially acceptable.
None of that happens without those first few smoking bans.
And all of it took a long time.
Return to Sept. 28, 2010. Texting while driving is illegal in 31 states because most experts – even those from that insurance industry group – recognize that the practice is dangerous. But it’s newly illegal and still very much socially acceptable.
That will change, too, just not tomorrow.
