Effects of a Driver Cellphone Ban on Overall, Handheld, and Hands-Free Cellphone Use While Driving: New Evidence from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We provide new evidence on the effects of increasingly common driver cellphone bans on self-reported overall, handheld, and hands-free cellphone use while driving by studying Ontario, Canada, which instituted a 3-month education campaign in November 2009 followed by a binding driver cellphone ban in February 2010. Using residents of Alberta as a control group in a difference-in-differences framework, we find visual and regression-based evidence that Ontario's cellphone ban significantly reduced overall and handheld cellphone use. We also find that the policies significantly increased hands-free cellphone use. The reductions in overall and handheld use are driven exclusively by women, whereas the increases in hands-free use are much larger for men. Our results provide the first direct evidence that cellphone bans have the unintended effect of inducing substitution to hands-free devices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".