Cell Phones & Accidents

Jacob Sullum | December 2, 2002

The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis has updated its 2000 study of mobile telephone use by drivers. Back then it estimated that banning on-the-road calls would impose a net cost of around $23 billion. Now, using new data on phone use and taking into account unreported accidents, it calculates that the net cost would be close to zero. “While there is still a lot of uncertainty," the study's author says, "the central values indicate that, in economic terms, a ban on the use of cell phones by drivers would be a wash when comparing the benefit of reducing crashes against the cost of eliminating those calls.”