By Peter Hirschfeld Vermont Press Bureau
MONTPELIER – The Vermont Senate – usually a place where highway-safety bills go to die – looks poised to move ahead with a measure that would ban motorists from typing messages onto cell phone keyboards while driving.
On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Transportation set to work on a “texting while driving” provision that proponents say would decrease the incidence of one of the deadliest distractions on Vermont roadways.
Calls for texting bans aren’t new. Over the past two years, the Vermont House has given broad bipartisan approval to highway-safety bills that included bans on texting while driving. The effort has won new political momentum though as Senate leaders take interest in the issue.
“My philosophy has always been that you can’t legislate common sense,” said Senate President Peter Shumlin, a Windham County Democrat who sits on the Senate Transportation Committee and has had an aversion to past highway-safety measures. But his own experiences with texting, Shumlin said, have convinced him that the issue demands legislative intervention.
“I have watched my teenage daughters move from telephones to e-mail communication to incessant texting,” he said. “The whole point of this bill is to get rid of this culture of texting while driving, and I’m willing to give it a shot.”
The relative youth of many texting-while-driving offenders has only exacerbated the dangers of the practice, supporters of the bill said Tuesday. Inexperience on the roads is dangerous enough. Combining that inexperience with technological distraction, according to Rutland County Sheriff Stephen Benard, can have catastrophic consequences.
“I would equate texting today to being very similar to the issues we had with driving under the influence,” Benard told lawmakers.
Lt. John Flanagan, commander of the traffic safety unit for the Vermont State Police, said the number of texting-related traffic accidents has increased steadily over the past three years, from 12 in 2007 to 42 in 2009. Last year’s texting-related crashes, he said, included at least three fatalities. The statistics, he said, likely underreport significantly the number of accidents directly attributable to texting distractions, since motorists are unlikely to volunteer that information.
“When we talk about distractions, this is probably seen as the most high-risk activity we can do on highways,” Flanagan said.
New research has offered proponents of texting bans even more statistical ammunition. A University of Utah study found people are eight times more likely to be involved in a crash if they were texting; a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study concluded that drivers who text are 23 times more likely to get in an accident than those who do not.
Norman James, who heads Project RoadSafe at the Vermont Department of Labor, told legislators Tuesday that driving while texting virtually ensures the “unholy three.”
“Eyes off the road. Hands off the wheel. And mind off the task,” James said. “It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for death.”
Senate lawmakers are still firming the details of their texting bill, which does not yet contain either an enforcement mechanism or a sanction. Shumlin said he’ll insist that texting while driving be a secondary offense – that is, law enforcement will not be able to pull over a motorist solely for texting.
Lawmakers said it will be difficult to enforce the new ban, but that the passage of a bill alone will convince many drivers to put the cell phone down. The law, they said, would also spur new outreach at schools and public education campaigns by state agencies.
This article appeared in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus
