The Bush administration shuttered a potentially groundbreaking research project designed to examine the effects of cellphone use on driver safety, and it suppressed information that could have shed more light on the problem, according to documents uncovered by Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a division of the Department of Transportation (DOT), wanted to conduct a long-term study that would monitor cell phone use and driving habits of 10,000 motorists, but political appointees halted the project.

To make matters worse, Bush officials decided not to inform state policy makers, not to mention the public at large, of new information on the issue. To combat the risks associated with cellphone use while driving, many states and localities have prohibited drivers from talking on their phones unless using a hands-free headset. But NHTSA found that such laws may not help. In 2003, NHTSA officials wanted to warn governors of their finding and drafted a letter on behalf of then-Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta:

Indeed, research has demonstrated that there is little, if any, difference between the use of hand-held and hands-free phones in contributing to the risk of driving while distracted. In either operational mode, we have found that the cognitive distraction is significant enough to degrade a drivers’ performance. 

Unfortunately, the letter was never approved; it was kept secret until Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety released it today.

Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of NHTSA, told The New York Times that he was warned against approving the letter because Congressional appropriators had instructed the DOT not to lobby state governments. Apparently, by DOT’s and/or Congress’s definition, warning governors of a major public safety threat is some pernicious form of lobbying.

Drivers killed or injured during crashes that stem from cellphone use are part of what appears to be an epidemic. “The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002,” The New York Times reports. “Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.”

If NHTSA’s research had been released earlier, state and local governments could have adjusted their policies to more effectively prevent crashes. Drivers, equipped with a fuller understanding of the risks posed by cellphone use, could have altered their behavior. The research could have drawn national attention to the problem. Instead, “People died in crashes because the government withheld this information,” said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety.

For now, it does not appear as though the Obama administration will take a different tack. The New York Times article finishes with a troubling passage:

The agency’s current policy is that people should not use cellphones while driving. Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the agency, said it did not, and would not, publish the researchers’ fatality estimates because they were not definitive enough.

He said the other research was compiled as background material for the agency, not for the public.

“There is no report to publish,” he said.  

Image by Flickr user poka0059, used under a Creative Commons license.