Articles Posted in Distracted Driving

Two new studies receiving media attention this month indicate that the problem of distracted driving in Oregon and elsewhere around the country may be even worse than many people think.

According to the Associated Press the first study, released earlier this month by the safety-advocacy group the National Safety Council found that “crash deaths in cases where drivers were on the phone were seriously underreported… The underreporting makes the problem of distracted driving appear less significant than it actually is and impedes efforts to win passage of tougher laws.” The group examined car crash data for 2009 through 2011.

Perhaps the most surprising finding of the study was that “even when drivers admitted to authorities that they were using a phone during an accident in which someone was killed, about half the cases weren’t recorded that way in the database, the council said” referring to the highway safety database maintained by the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Two articles published in recent days by the New York Times illustrate both the continuing challenge we all face in attempting to curb distracted driving and the paradox of technology – the cause of so many Oregon distracted driving problems –sometimes offering solutions to the very problems it helps create.

One Times article begins with a dramatic statistic: “at any moment during daylight hours, according to a new government study, 660,000 Americans are using cellphones or other electronic devices while driving.” The study cited by the newspaper concluded that years of anti-distracted driving campaigns have succeeded in raising public awareness but have been less successful in convincing individual Americans that their own behavior behind the wheel – as opposed to everyone else’s – is potentially part of the problem.

“Almost half of those surveyed, 48 percent, said they answered their cellphones while driving at least some of the time, and 58 percent said they continued to drive after picking up the phone. Fourteen percent said they still text or email while driving,” the Times reports. Those numbers were up significantly from last year’s NHTSA survey, in which they were 40 percent and ten percent respectively. Perhaps ironically, the survey also showed that “most drivers… support a ban on cellphone use and texting while driving, and 76 percent said they would likely say something if they were a passenger alongside a driver who was sending a text.”

An article published last week in The Oregonian’s ‘Hard Drive’ column asked a simple question: if using a cellphone behind the wheel is considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant Oregon’s distracted driving law, what about other potential distractions?

The question was prompted by Washington’s new law legalizing marijuana use. Pot may be legal, but should you be driving with it in your system? If marijuana is going to be legal to consume, should its potential to impair a driver be treated more-or-less the same way that we treat alcohol consumption and driving?

If the answer is ‘yes’ that opens an entirely separate conversation about impairment levels and the best way to measure them. For our purposes, however, the question is broader. As The Oregonian puts it, “whether it’s applying lipstick or reading a book (or flicking ashes from a Camel), trying to micromanage and ban every kind of distraction isn’t the quixotic endeavor that it used to be.”

A recent New York Times article highlights a high-profile opponent of distracted driving here in Oregon and around the nation whose job might raise some eyebrows: he is the chairman and CEO of AT&T. As the newspaper notes, Randall Stephenson began his remarks at an investors’ conference last week with a plea to everyone in the audience not to text and drive.

“He’s been saying it a lot lately,” the paper continues, “at investor conferences, the annual shareholder meeting in April, town halls, civic club meetings, and in conversations with chief executives of other major companies.”

AT&T is not unique among cellphone companies in taking on this issue but, as the Times reports, Stephenson’s emphasis on it stands out both for its seriousness of purpose and for the personal nature of his story. “Mr. Stephenson said in an interview that a few years ago someone close to him caused an accident while texting,” the paper reports. The result has been a high profile anti-texting campaign by the company, one that the paper says has impressed even organizers focused on the broader issue of distracted driving as an advocacy and policy issue.

A recent announcement by the Hillsboro police department, as reported in The Oregonian, comes as a welcome addition to the summer: the department plans to “have designated officers focused on distracted driving throughout the summer.”

Hillsboro officers working specially designated overtime shifts (funded, the paper notes, by an outside grant) will focus their attention on a broad range of behind-the-wheel distractions. That means that in addition to enforcing violations of Oregon’s distracted driving law, they will also be on the lookout “for people who are distracted by other activities, such as eating and reading.”

“All distractions endanger the driver, passengers and bystanders,” the newspaper quotes a department spokesman saying. Officers, he said, will regularly conduct the extra enforcement patrols between now and September.

I could not let the month end without taking note of the fact that April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, so designated by the US National Safety Council.

As The Oregonian and other local media have noted, police and other law enforcement officials are marking the month with stepped-up efforts at both enforcement of the state’s two-year-old distracted driving law, and at education. The paper reports that last year the “state police pulled over 3,782 drivers suspected of texting or talking on a handheld cell phone, a 7 percent increase over 2010.” It further notes that the OSP issued over 1,400 tickets and 2,350 warnings.

It’s also worth noting that this month Idaho and West Virginia became the latest states to outlaw texting while driving. That brings the total number of states banning the practice to 37, according to the ‘Family Car Guide’ website.

The New Year brought with it quiet news of an important development in the battle against Oregon distracted driving. Beginning this month, Oregon drivers stopped by police for using a handset while driving will no longer be able to avoid the two-year-old Oregon distracted driving law’s penalties by claiming that they were making a work-related call.

The language of the original bill passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor allowed an exception for use of a handheld cellphone by an Oregon driver if the call in question “is necessary for the person’s job,” as the Los Angeles Times writes. This was arguably intended to be a way to protect police and other emergency services personnel whose jobs often require the use of a cellphone or hand-held radio.

In practice, however, it developed into a glaring loophole. As the Gresham Outlook noted in a recent editorial, the work exception “was that annoying escape route for ticketed drivers who used the ‘I was on a work call’ defense to get out of paying fines.”

A pair of recent stories from Washington go a long way toward putting Oregon’s, and the nation’s, distracted driving problem in context: last week the National Transportation Safety Board formally called for a nationwide ban on “driver use of personal electronic devices,” according to the Washington Post. This came only a few days after new data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that “for all the criticism and new legal bans, texting by drivers just keeps increasing, especially among younger motorists,” according to a report filed by the Associated Press.

Both of the organizations are independent federal agencies. The NHTSA studies and promotes highway and traffic safety while the NTSB is charged with investigating transportation accidents of all types (i.e. not just cars and trucks).

The NTSB statement was particularly strongly worded, according to the Post, and followed the lengthy investigation of a crash last year in Missouri in which “a 19-year-old pickup driver sent 11 texts in the 11 minutes before the accident.” The paper adds that the NHTSA’s data show that in 2009 (the last year for which numbers are available) distracted driving resulted in 5000 deaths and half-a-million injuries on America’s roads.