Automotive anarchists will be overjoyed. AT&T, Verizon and Rogers executives will be high-fiving each other with unprecedented I-told-you-so fervour. And Big Brother’s safety czars will be in full denial mode, wondering quite why their all-powerful lobbyists didn’t quash these cockamamie studies before they saw the light of day.

It turns out that talking on cellphones may not be dangerous after all; or, at least, the current bans on their use are ineffective. Yup, despite all the hype, countless studies and the pontificating by the self-righteously smug that hordes of us are dying because we were all so distracted by our iPhones, it turns out the banning of in-car communications by many jurisdictions (including Ontario) has not reduced accidents one iota. Indeed, there’s a possibility that the restrictions made things worse.

According to the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), while actual hand-held cellphone usage declined in states that enacted bans, accident rates did not. Indeed, according to a study by the U.S. Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), texting bans have actually increased accident rates. The HLDI compared each state’s accident rate before and after the texting bans as well as with neighbouring jurisdictions without any texting restrictions and, according to Adrian Lund, president of the HLDI as well as the IIHS, “Texting bans haven’t reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in three of the four states we studied after bans were enacted.”

Now even a skeptical libertine such as your rules-phobic Motor Mouth isn’t ready to proclaim that texting while driving saves lives. According to the HLDI, it’s not the concept of preventing in-car typing that is driving the seemingly wonky statistics but rather the execution of the ban. In a classic be-wary-of-what-you-wish-for unintended consequence — and, now, this is me being self-righteously smug since I predicted something like this in my original Motor Mouth on Ontario’s ban — drivers are simply holding their smartphones lower to escape detection, resulting in even greater distraction.

Software that prevents texting in a moving car would seem to be a better solution than driving our automotive communications underground. On-board communications devices that read text messages aloud would also seem to be a solution, though I suspect that truly devoted rules and regulations statists will decry any mobile communications device as the work of the devil. And, of course, that doesn’t address the possibility that talking on a cellphone, hands-free or not, doesn’t appear to be a distraction at all.