There was a story this morning on one of the local TV news programs about the first month of the no texting/no teen age cell phone law here in the People’s Republic. Under 200 traffic citations have been issued for violating the law in the first month of enforcement. Apparently some people think that this number was too law and that more tickets should have been given out.  You can go here to view the video, after a brief commercial of course.

The reporter comments that one of the possible reasons is that people are complying with the law. You know, which is what lawmakers tell us is the reason that they pass new laws to deal with these trumped up crises.  A lawmaker and an “advocate” talk about how difficult the law is to enforce and that it should be amended to make enforcement easier.

So, one possibility is that people are heeding the new law. Of course the only way to know that is to compare the rate of accidents caused (allegedly) by texting drivers or yakking teen drivers. The problem with that is accident reports allow for more than one cause to be listed for every accident. So, every agenda driven advocacy group, which is all of them, can claim that their particular crisis is the cause of the accident. Very handy for manipulating statistics, the public, and the politicians. That aside, I’d be willing to be that before the law was passed there were no hard, verifiable figures on the extent of the “crisis” and that after the law is enacted, very loose statistics will be put forth to prove that the law is “working”.

That’s one possibility. Another is that it’s not that high a priority for police officers. They have enough other things to go to keep them busy without pulling people over for possibly texting and driving. In which case, we shouldn’t see a change in the number of accidents involving those drivers. Well, if anyone bothered to keep accurate statistics.

Another is that the crisis was overblown from the beginning and there just aren’t that many violations to right up. Remember, this law bans texting by everyone and use of cell phones by teen drivers. It is not a hands free law.  Speaking of hands free laws, they don’t seem to work in New Jersey or California. Well, they don’t work to reduce accidents, they do work to increase revenue from fines.

Which brings the fourth, cynical, possibility. The crisis was trumped up to justify passing a law that would just happen to increase revenue to the state and municipalities. Which split the money from traffic fines 50-50. Not to mention the various surcharges that go to various groups, including insurance companies. Nah, that couldn’t be it, could it? No one could be so cynical as to promote a law that has not benefit to public safety, but does fill the coffers of the government.

Nah, never happen.