It comes as no surprise that the law that took effect in July 2015 has not, a year later, prevented many people from continuing to read and send emails and shoot off way too many text messages while driving. After all, if laws were all it took to correct irresponsible and dangerous behavior, we wouldn’t have much need for police departments.

But the law – which bans the use of hand-held electronic devices while operating a vehicle – is a vast improvement over what was in place before.

Distracted driving had ranked as the second- or third-leading cause of New Hampshire road deaths for the previous 19 years, said Capt. Matthew Shapiro, highway safety commander for the New Hampshire State Police. A year after enactment of one of the country’s most stringent hands-free laws, distracted driving dropped to sixth as a cause of fatal crashes.

Granted, we have to see how the numbers pan out over time, but the early returns are encouraging.

"It’s only one year of data," Shapiro said in a recent story by The Telegraph’s Kathryn Marchocki. "However, it would be awful coincidental – after 19 years of distracted driving being the second- or third-most likely cause of fatal crashes – to have it drop all the way down to number six, and that happened after a yearlong publicity program."

As Shapiro pointed out in the story, people using their phones while behind the wheel was "absolutely rampant" between 2010 and 2014 after cellphones essentially evolved into hand-held computers. Yet the law at the time was "riddled with loopholes" and "unenforceable," he said, because it only prohibited texting and two-handed mobile device use while driving.

The law that has been in effect for the past year has some teeth in it, too, giving police the leverage they need to do their jobs.

State police stopped at least 6,091 cars for violating the hands-free law from Jan. 1 through June 19 this year. Those stops resulted in 3,215 citations and 2,876 verbal warnings, Shapiro said.

Clearly, the public has some work to do when it comes to obeying the law, and police undoubtedly have more work to do enforcing it.

"All day long, it’s not difficult to come up with these – again, blatantly holding the phone right up," said Nashua officer Sean Mabry while parked on the side of the road watching traffic pass by on Main Street.

The law hasn’t altered everyone’s behavior, but Shapiro believes it has brought about an improvement in the state’s driving culture. And the results suggest it has turned out better in the first year than its critics predicted when the bill was being debated.

"This is a wicked bad bill," Rep. James Belanger, R-Hollis, said at the time, maintaining that the bill was unenforceable.

Rep. Michael Garcia, D-Nashua and a commercial driver, said the proposal amounted to regulatory overkill. "This is aimed at treating all of us as children and government as the solution to the problem," Garcia said in 2014.

To be sure, we would like to see more people hang up and pay attention to the road while they drive. At the same time, the initial returns suggest that legislators did the right thing when they passed the hands-free law.