{"id":13933,"date":"2010-10-01T06:18:07","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T11:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=13933"},"modified":"2010-10-01T06:18:07","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T11:18:07","slug":"regulation-kills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=13933","title":{"rendered":"Regulation Kills"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laws against texting and driving – including Minnesota’s –\u00a0perversely increase text-driving accidents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

HLDI studied collision claims before and after four states (California, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Washington) banned texting, and compared the data with crashes in nearby states where texting laws did not change. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and Guam prohibit texting while driving, while eight states, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands prohibit the handheld use of mobile phones behind the wheel.<\/p>\n

“Texting bans haven’t reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in 3 of the 4 states we studied after bans were enacted. It’s an indication that texting bans might even increase the risk of texting for drivers who continue to do so despite the laws,” said Adrian Lund, president of HLDI and IIHS. “The point of texting bans is to reduce crashes, and by this essential measure the laws are ineffective.”<\/p>\n

The crash increases seen in the states ranged from 1% in Washington state to 9% in Minnesota. However, young drivers are more likely to get into crashes – accidents went up in each of the four states among those drivers after the texting laws took effect. The largest hike was 12% in California.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the one hand, it might <\/em>mean that there are 9% more texters. \u00a0Or that 9% of texters didn’t hear about the law.<\/p>\n

Or that text-messagers are taking such absurd measures to hide their texting from cops and other drivers that they are \u00a0making themselves more dangerous than they’d have been otherwise.<\/p>\n

They are, in short, not Happy To Stop Texting For A Better Minnesota.<\/p>\n

Now if people won’t stop text messaging to avoid crashes, lawsuits and death<\/em>, because they see it in their best interest (rightly or wrongly) to evade the spirit and letter of the law, how does the DFL figure they won’t work even harder to avoid being seen as making over $150K a year come tax time under a Mark Dayton regime?<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laws against texting and driving – including Minnesota’s –\u00a0perversely increase text-driving accidents: HLDI studied collision claims before and after four states (California, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Washington) banned texting, and compared the data with crashes in nearby states where texting laws did not change. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and Guam prohibit texting while driving, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13933"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13935,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13933\/revisions\/13935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}