Cell Phone Ban in NJ
...t of Columbia has also enacted a similar ban. Bob Gaydosh, Regional Supervisor of northern New Jersey for the Division of Law and Public Safety, said the effects of the cell phone ban in New Jersey have not yet been tested. Furthermore, the state won’t require this until 2006. “We do not have any statistics relating to the effectiveness of the cell phone ban yet,” Gaydosh said. “According to the law, the state has two years to report back to the legislature on the effectiveness so really there hasn’t been any data gathered on it yet,” he said. “But hopefully over the next year or two we will have some indications as to the effectiveness of the law.” “The committee on distracted driving has a two year window,” said Al Tindall from the DLPS, regional supervisor for central New Jersey. “However, I personally feel we’ll receive some very promising results.” “There’s nothing available yet and we’re gonna pretty much take it from this point forward and try to come up with some information and build a plan for the future,” Gaydosh said. Tindall explained that hopefully with good results, the violation will be upgraded to a primary offense. He hopes the offense will follow the path of the seatbelt law in New Jersey. Wearing a seatbelt was once a secondary offense in the state, but it was upgraded to a primary offense due to a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that showed 2 out of 10 drivers still weren’t wearing seat belts. While no statistics have been released yet in New Jersey, many who were opposed to the ban in the beginning have not changed their stance and believe the ban to be useless. “Overall, the ban really hasn’t affected anything at all,” said Eric Scrum, communications director for the National Motorist Association. “In terms of safety increase, no officials even in New York (where the ban has been in effect longer) have come forth with any numbers that show any positive effect.” A study recently done on NY drivers backed up Scrum’s opinion. It showed that the effects of their cell phone legislation in their state were only temporary. Cell phone use while driving declined after a similar ban was enacted in New York but increased a year later, according to a 2004 study by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety in the journal “Injury Prevention”. Researchers studied 50,000 drivers in Albany, Binghamton, Kingston and Spring Valley. What they found was the number of people talking on cell phones sank from 2.3 per cent right before the ban was passed to 1.1 per cent in the first few months after it was passed. However, by March 2003, it had grown back up to 2.1 per cent. During the first few months of the ban, drivers in New York were issued warnings instead of tickets if they were caught talking on their cell phones. Until Feb. 2002, charges were dismissed if a driver presented a judge with a receipt that they had purchased a hands-free device. Scrum said personally he doesn’t believe people are using their cell phones any differently now in New Jersey, saying almost anyone who used a phone while driving before continues to use them. He also feels the ban is simply being used as a revenue generator, explaining that the money made from fines goes back to those issuing the tickets. What the association suggests, he said, is to eliminate the ban and focus on driving laws already in place. “Ticket the behavior,” he said, don’t use arbitrary bans. A ban is not a safety tool, he said. “We’ve opposed the ban from the very beginning,” Scrum said. Another organization that has opposed the ban from the beginning is the American Automobile Association. Pam Maiolo, Public and Government Relations Manager in the Eastern Region of AAA Mid-Atlantic, said the ban will not prove effective. “We took the position that the holding or non-holding of a cell phone is not the distraction,” she said. “The conversation is the distraction issue. We continue to maintain that position.” AAA is concerned over the fact that legislature made the ban a secondary violation. If it was so important, she said, why isn’t it a primary offense? “The mental part and the thought going into that conversation is distracting you from the task at hand,” she said. She believes talking on a cell phone is just as distracting as talking to a passenger in the car. However, she did admit talking to a passenger is safer because the passenger can help warn a driver if something happens in the roadway. Someone on a cell phone can’t do that, she said. Distracted driving is the leading...