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Text messaging while driving has long been indicted as one of the many leading causes of preventable car accidents in the United States. The idea that drivers can’t concentrate on safely and attentively operating a moving vehicle while they fiddle with their cell phones has led legislators in many states to pass bans on texting while driving, with stiff penalties for those who disobey. But this trend might be stymied by a new report showing that cell phone bans have not had a significant impact on the number of car accidents taking place. The results shed an interesting light on assumptions that social scientists have long held about what exactly is distracting America’s drivers.

The study showed approximately the same accident rates in areas studied both before and after the cellular phone prohibitions went into effect. All of these states had bans on talking on a handheld phone device (allowing citizens to use Bluetooth hands-free adaptors or the equivalent), and most had also passed bans on texting and driving as well. The state laws fell back on previous studies that showed talking on the phone or texting while driving made drivers significantly more likely to be an accident, since their attention was distracted.

There were doubts almost from the beginning about the efficacy of these laws. First of all, there was plentiful evidence that many drivers – especially young ones – were simply ignoring the rules. Last month, Reuters published an article claiming that most teen drivers simply ignored the prohibitions and were texting and talking on phones while driving with impunity. Police have permission to ticket drivers breaking these laws, but law enforcement officials in all the states effected have admitted that catching a driver texting while driving is difficult at best.

There have been several Congressional calls for a national restriction on texting while driving. Federal employees are already banned from doing so under national law, and this week a new law was announced that also obliges bus drivers and the drivers of big rigs to hang up while behind the wheel. The fines are massive for breaking these laws – almost three thousand dollars for first-time offenders!

But the question still remains: are these bans truly effective? According to the Highway Loss Data Institute, the answer is no – the number of auto crashes has remained more or les steady in states where cell phones are banned behind the wheel. Adrian Lund, the Institute’s president and head of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, stated that although it is known that the laws have reduced the use of handheld phones, “the laws aren’t reducing crashes.” Lund doesn’t dispute the older studies showing that using phones while driving is associated with a higher risk of crashes. The study found that the cutback in the amount of drivers that talk on a handheld phone device after the bans is statistically quite significant, yet a corresponding decrease in the number of car accidents is not being seen. The only exception is New York state, where a reduction in accidents was indeed noted… with a caveat. The falling number of auto accidents in New York had already started at the time when the cell phone bans were put into effect.

In compiling their data, the Institute’s researchers examined the number of insurance claims per one hundred vehicles on the road on a monthly basis. Technically, they used the concept of a “vehicle year” – one car insured for one year, two cars insured for six months, and so forth. The researchers examined cars up to three years old over the months right before and after the cell phone bans were enacted, to see whether there was any considerable difference in the number of accidents these cars were involved in. The study focused on major driving states where there were driving bans and plenty of cars on the road; specifically New York, DC, Connecticut, and California. As a point of comparison, locales around those with bans in effect, but having no talking and driving bans in place themselves were used for numerical comparison. Sure enough, the studies showed no major differences.

Lund called the results “surprising,” given that there were a few established facts that researchers believed they knew about cell phone usage while driving, and the study’s results simply do not match up. It’s known that the likelihood of a crash increases with phone use, and that fewer drivers use their handheld phones when it has been made illegal for them to do so. Therefore, it should be logical to assume that there would be fewer crashes when the cell phone usage was made illegal – but this does not, in fact, happen. There is not an increase in the amount of insurance collision claims, no matter how improbable it seems. The Institute is currently looking into what could have caused this mismatch of results.

One suggestion is that hands-free phone usage (using a Bluetooth device to send and receive phone calls, for example) is just as dangerous as the utilization of a handheld phone device. The current state laws banning phoning while driving do not disallow drivers from using hands-free adaptors. It could be that these solutions are equally distracting. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the current laws are proven to not be doing much to make the roads much safer.