California banned using a hand-held phone while driving in 2008. The report from the State Office of Traffic safety looked at the two years prior to that - and the two years after. The finding: deaths from crashes involving hand-held phones are down 47 percent. Chris Cochran is with the Office of Traffic Safety:
Cochran: "Now all traffic deaths also went down, but that was by 22% so that additional 20-what - 4-5% on top of that is just in cell phone fatalities."
Cochran says there were more than 460-thousand hand-held cell
phone convictions in California last year. The average first
offense ticket is at least 159 dollars. The analysis of state crash
records was conducted by the Safe Transportation Research and
Education Center at UC Berkeley.