A Stitch in Haste

The Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling makes a drive-by in New Jersey:

Those cigars, pipes and cigarettes would become no-nos for drivers. Offenders would be stung with a fine of up to US$250, under the measure, whose sponsor said it's designed more to improve highway safety than protect health.
...
Assemblyman John McKeon, a tobacco opponent whose father died of emphysema, sponsored the legislation. He cites a AAA-sponsored study on driver distractions in which the automobile association found that of 32,000 accidents linked to distraction, 1 percent were related to smoking.

The consensus is that the bill has little or no chance of passing. Good.

Crunching some numbers -- 1% of 32,000 "distraction accidents" equals 320 "smoking accidents."

In 2003 there were 6.3 million vehicle crashes in the U.S. So smoking causes or contributes to roughly 0.32% of accidents -- less than one-third of one percent.

But to activist legislators, that's reason enough to ban it. This way their lust for the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling is satisfied. They "did something." Whether it's something useful or cost-effective does not matter to them.

And of course hack politicians never see the unintended consequences of the laws they pass, only the purported benefits -- the one-third of one percent. Which would you rather see on the road -- a calm driver fumbling for his cigarettes for a few moments (e.g., the father in Six Feet Under), or a nervous driver having a nic-fit for his entire journey? Might the latter create more than one-third of one percent more accidents?

And even if not -- the lost utility to a smoker from being denied access to her tobacco while driving is not costless. If a person is less happy under a new law, then society is worse off because of that law; there is a real emotional cost, even if modest. Might that cost outweigh the supposed benefits of 320 fewer accidents? (Remember, we have no idea whether these are serious accidents or mere fender-benders).

And if this is not anti-smoker animus, then why stop there? People fumble to change radion stations or CDs in the car stereo -- shall we ban that? Most accidents occur (perhaps unsurprisingly) between midnight and 3AM on weekends -- shall we close down the roads during those hours? And of course we all know the old hospital joke "What do you call motorcycle riders?" -- Banning all motorcycles would have prevented five times as many accidents in 2003 than a smoking ban.

If politicians and bureaucrats want to escalate the war on smokers (in which property rights are always the worst collateral damage), then they should at least have the intellectual honesty to admit as much when they propose anti-smoking legislation, rather than trying to cloak their motives behind the red herring of "traffic safety."

The politicians should stop driving us crazy.