Cellphone law: Will the roads be any safer?

This state's drivers will spend millions of dollars for Bluetooth headsets and other devices to comply with the new distracted-driving law taking effect next week.

But even after all that expense, many researchers believe, the law allowing officers to pull you over and ticket you $124 for driving while talking on a handheld cellphone won't decrease crash risks.

"It's a feel-good law. It makes people think, 'We're trying to do something to address the problem,' " says professor David Strayer, of the University of Utah's psychology department.

He agrees there's a big problem with driver impairment and cellphones, with cellphone users four times as likely to get into crashes. He has been part of research showing that cellphone-using drivers can be just as impaired as drunken drivers.

But his research, and over the years that at other institutions — including the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine — shows there is no difference in driver impairment between those talking on handheld versus hands-free cells.

The problem, he says, isn't with the hands. It's with the brain. Drivers turn their focus to the conversation rather than the road.

When using either kind of cellphone, says Strayer, "the brain becomes overloaded."

Lawmakers and law-enforcement officials who support the new law acknowledge the studies, but say the new law is better than nothing at all.

"I have boxes and boxes of material," says state Sen. Tracey Eide, a Democrat from Federal Way who spent the past 10 years trying to get a cellphone law passed.

"I never said there was a difference between hands-free and handheld."

Then why bother with a law that stops just one kind of cellphone?

"At least with hands-free, people will look left and look right when driving, and they don't do that with a hands-on because they're holding it up to their ears," Eide says. "They don't have a free hand when they're signaling, and don't have two hands on the wheel. It's dangerous."

She said the new law is "going to save lives, even if it's one or two people not picking up the cellphone."

Strayer counters that it's possible the law might actually make the roads less safe. "It's possible the law could even create harm. It sends an implicit message that hands-free must be safer. It might even encourage people to talk more than they normally would have."

State Patrol Chief John Batiste says his officers will enforce the law "from day one" when it goes into effect June 10. Although he'd like drivers not to use cellphones at all, the new law "is as close as we're going to get."

In a news release, Batiste said that after the original cellphone law went into effect in July 2008 as a secondary offense, drivers sometimes showed outright defiance.

"They would look right at our troopers with phones held to their ears," he said. "They knew that without another violation we couldn't do anything."

Still, in the past two years, the troopers issued 3,000 cellphone tickets that totaled $372,000.

Conflicting conclusions

There are numerous studies concerning cellphones and driving, with some literally putting a camera behind a driver, and others using simulated driving conditions with a computer and screen.

Sometimes the interpretations are conflicting.

Jed Kolko, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, which advertises itself as a nonpartisan research group, analyzed car fatalities in New York state, which enacted a hands-free law in 2001. He concluded that law reduced fatalities.

Kolko seems to be the only one reaching such a conclusion about bans on handhelds.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which studied monthly collision claims through its research arm, the hands-free laws "aren't reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced handheld phone use."

Searching for an explanation, Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research, says, "It's hard to explain. We're trying to do additional research."

For professor Frank Drews, a University of Utah colleague of Strayer who also has spent a decade studying cellphone distraction, this state's law "misses the target."

What the discussion should be about, he says, is banning all cellphone use when driving.

What it comes down to, says Drews, is that whatever kind of cellphone you're using on the road, it induces "a form of inattention blindness in which drivers fail to see objects in their driving environment."

He and Strayer attached electrodes to the skulls of test subjects so they could graph brain activity under simulated driving conditions on a multilane freeway.

In the simulation, subjects followed a pace car that braked at random, and their brains had to process this information that in real life would be crucial. In the simulation, processing was cut in half when the subject was using a (in this case, hands-free) cellphone.

"Thinking that buying a Bluetooth is now going to make you safe doesn't do it," says Drews.

For sure, the marketers of Bluetooth handsets and other hands-free cellphone devices will benefit from the new law.

Bluetooth benefit

Plantronics, the market-share leader for Bluetooth headsets in this country, says it sees a spike in sales up to four weeks before, and up to six weeks after, a state enacts a cellphone law. Washington's law mimics that of a handful of other states — including California, New Jersey and Oregon — that make texting and talking without a headset a primary offense.

Washington's law also prohibits any cellphone use by a driver under 18 years old.

Plantronics' headsets range from $40 to $120, with popular models selling at around $100, the company says.

That all adds up to plenty of money, as there are roughly 2.4 million drivers 18 and over who use handheld cellphones in this state.

For Lauren Weinstein, the Los Angeles co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a grass-roots movement dealing with cyberspace issues, banning handhelds "is a triumph of politics over science."

Back in 2002, Weinstein wrote an opinion piece for Wired magazine saying that cellphones were "a handy technological scapegoat."

He says the solution isn't banning cellphones in cars, but dealing with distracted driving in general, and that cellphones account for a very small percentage of accidents.

A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study supports that idea. It found that reaching for a moving object (a book that fell, a dog, a child) in a car is nearly seven times more likely to cause a crash than talking on a handheld cellphone. And "personal grooming" is 3 ½ times as risky.

"I'm being facetious, but we're not banning kids in cars, are we?" says Weinstein.

Meanwhile, says Strayer, if you think hands-free cellphone devices are so safe, what about this latest gimmick? For $32.99, now you can buy a mount for your iPad that can go on your dashboard or windshield.

You can use an iPad to check e-mail, surf the Web or watch movies.

Under Washington state law, you just need to make sure that iPad isn't obstructing the driver's vision.

If it isn't, you're fine, says the State Patrol.

Just don't put it up to your ear.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com