Do laws against texting while driving reduce or increase car crashes?

You might think: of course those laws make the roads safer. But that's far from obvious (via):

Researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute compared rates of collision insurance claims in four states — California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington — before and after they enacted texting bans. Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted.

The Highway Loss group theorizes that drivers try to evade police by lowering their phones when texting, increasing the risk by taking their eyes even further from the road and for a longer time.

The findings "call into question the way policymakers are trying to address the problem of distracted-driving crashes," Lund says, calling for a strategy that goes beyond cellphones to hit other behaviors such as eating and putting on makeup. "They're focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it," he says.

But I'm skeptical of these conclusions as the article presents them. Look again at that sentence: "Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted." It doesn't tell us how much the rates rose. When journalists report on research that shows an increase or decrease in anything, I wish they'd tell us how big the increase or decrease was.

I've been noticing this a lot lately. For instance, this article tells us that religious people give "more" donations to charity and do "more" volunteer work; this one says religious people have "higher levels of 'life satisfaction.'" But they don't tell us how much more (or higher). If anything, I'd guess that the difference was fairly small; otherwise, the reporter probably would have wanted to quantify it in order to impress us with the finding.


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