Brown: Texting while driving bill unfounded

As the Pennsylvania legislature’s 2009-10 session winds down, house Democrats are rushing to… As the Pennsylvania legislature’s 2009-10 session winds down, house Democrats are rushing to push through legislation to ban texting while driving. The problem is, they might be causing more harm than good.

The Highway Loss Data Institute published a report last week that found that, of the four states that recently passed texting bans, none of them saw reductions in accidents last year.

In fact, researchers saw increased insurance claims for collisions, with Washington state itself recording 9 percent more accidents.

Adrian Lund, the president of both HLDI and its sister organization, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said in the report that, “[Lawmakers are] focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it. This ignores the endless sources of distraction and relies on banning one source or another to solve the whole problem.”

But his remarks are going largely ignored as Democrats struggle to get a bill to Gov. Ed Rendell by next month. Some of the more vocal supporters of the bill include state Reps. Joseph F. Markosek, D-25, Eugene A. DePasquale, D-95, and Josh Shapiro, D-153 — perhaps the bill’s most outspoken backer.

Shapiro said the HLDI’s results proved inconclusive at best and deceptive at worst.

In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Shapiro cited statistics about accidents involving hands-free versus handheld phones. His statistics showed that in 2009, just 479 accidents involved the former while 8,014 involved drivers using at least one hand to hold a phone.

There’s no denying that distractions , including cell phones, increase the rate at which accidents occur. Shapiro said, “This clearly demonstrates that limiting hand-held cell phone use limits the number of crashes.”

That claim is flat-out deceiving in its own right. In making his own apples-to-oranges comparison, Shapiro ignores both the relatively limited number of people who own wireless headsets as well a separation between text- and call-related accidents.

However, banning texting while driving through government-imposed nannying isn’t going to curtail drivers from doing it. As with underage drinking in college, people who want to do it are going to do it anyway.

Where Shapiro or anyone in agreement with his perspective ultimately come up short-sighted is in realizing the consequences of banning in-car texting. Perhaps best illustrated by the HDLI study, drivers in states banning the practice are just lowering phones out of view to avoid a ticket.

So instead of having drivers looking up at a raised phone on the steering wheel, the states with increased accidents — including California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington state in this study — probably have drivers looking down in their laps to fiddle with their fingers and phones.

Additionally, there are too many loopholes in this bill to make it effective. From GPS programming in a phone to finding a number,  Section 3316 proposed by the bill has enough exceptions listed in it to make it seriously questionable as to whether this legislation could even be enforced.

But as long as it all looks morally responsible in the eyes of safety trolls to ensure the public welfare, politicians should be able to get good nights of sleep knowing that they made potentially deadly decisions that look responsible.

I don’t text while I drive. I’ve found that I can’t. I drive a car with three pedals on the floor and a row-it-yourself transmission. If I do text in my car, it’s done at a red light.

Even when I owned an automatic car that freed up my hand and foot, I still didn’t. But then again, I enjoy driving and I realize I share the road with cars that would crush mine in an accident, so I drive defensively.

Rather than issue reactive legislation to slap motorists on the wrist for using a phone in their cars, possibly in urgent situations, politicians should try to be proactive for once. After all, driving is a responsibility — not a right.

In Germany, for instance, a driver’s license can cost the equivalent of more than $2,000, according to The German Way’s website, a site exploring German culture. Germany also has much more difficult driving tests in addition to required basic vehicle-maintenance and first-aid classes to get certified. Both theory and in-car tests are much tougher than in the United States.

Those requirements sound a bit rigorous, but they make sense in a country that has no speed limit in many areas. In the U.S., we’re conditioned to think of driving as a necessary evil to get from A to B, so we try to multitask to pass the time.

Germany frontloads its driving requirements to weed out drivers, and perhaps we should, too. One part of the pending state driving legislation I agree with would mandate 65 hours of in-car training for junior drivers versus the current level of 50.

Additionally, states should mandate required high-speed defensive driving and maneuverability courses and tougher written tests. Because, let’s face it, do any of us really trust any other drivers on the roads, much less in Pittsburgh?

As of December 2009, the IIHS reported there were 286 million wireless phone subscriptions outstanding in the U.S. — up from 194 million in June 2005. As we become more wired, that number will likely increase further. Our governments should have better things to do than go all Big Brother on the drivers carrying those phones.

Instead, we should focus on making drivers safer before they get on the road — or, more likely, into a mess of nonsense and bureaucracy. A far easier solution would be to just outlaw the automatic transmission.

Please don’t text Jacob, but you can e-mail him at jeb110@pitt.edu or visit his blog at thingsthatrhymewithcars.wordpress.com.