Transportation and Legal News

Date: 9/16/2008 4:38 PM

By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP National Writer

One day last summer, Jim Messer, a Florida attorney, was nearly run off the road by another car. When he recovered, he says, he was able to see the other driver texting on her cell phone, balancing it on the wheel.

“There’s gotta be a law against this,” Messer thought. But there wasn’t — not in his state, anyway. He’s been working since then to get one passed.

Despite a general belief on the part of researchers and authorities that texting at the wheel, like other driver distractions, could be jeopardizing lives, only five states and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from doing it.

Now investigators are looking into whether texting may have played a role in the disastrous California train crash that killed 25. Two teenage train buffs told a TV station that the engineer, who was killed, sent them a text message a minute before the crash. A phone was not found.

For now, there is no data directly tying text messaging to traffic accidents. Though fully 74 percent of Americans aged 18-29 use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center, it’s a phenomenon that’s only a few years old.

But a 2006 government study found that distracted drivers of all sorts were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-crashes. And everyone knows that checking e-mails or sending a text message, just like talking on a cell phone or playing with the radio, can distract a driver. A researcher who worked on the 2006 study, Charlie Klauer of the Virginia Tech Traffic Institute, says the crash risk was doubled when a driver looked away from the road for two seconds out of six.

“Texting is potentially even more risky than speaking on a cell phone, because you’re not only taking your mind off the road — you’re taking your eyes off the road,” argues Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

But it’s very hard to prove, in the aftermath of a crash, that texting or e-mailing was the cause. Police in upstate New York found a series of messages sent and received from 17-year-old Bailey Goodman’s phone just before her sport utility vehicle slammed into a tractor-trailer one night in June last year, killing her and four friends who’d all just graduated from high school. But they couldn’t tell if she was the one using her phone.

It was enough for a state senator to propose a bill banning texting while driving in New York, where using a hand-held cell phone has been banned since 2001. The bill remains in committee. Only Alaska, Washington, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from texting, according to the IIHS; 12 other states have partial bans, such as drivers under 18 or bus drivers.

One emergency room doctor says he suspects most people don’t initiate text messages while driving — but can’t help themselves from responding to them.

“It’s hard to ignore the temptation,” says Dr. Mark Melrose of Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J., a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. “You think, this might be important, I’d better check. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, but you do it anyway.”

That’s an apt way to describe the habits of Liz Osaki, 23, who works at an advertising agency on the outskirts of Boston. Her daily commute is about an hour each way. And yes, she texts at the wheel, though mostly when she’s in traffic, or stopped at a light. Even when she’s not, “I promise I am still looking at the road,” she says.

The only mishaps Osaki reports are occasionally missing the moment a light turns from red to green, or not realizing as fast as she should that cars in front have braked suddenly. She argues that texting can actually be safer in the car than speaking on a cell phone.

“I think it’s less distracting because when I’m texting, I can always just throw the phone down,” she says. “You can’t do that in the middle of a phone conversation.”

More to the point is the fact that for Osaki, like many young Americans, texting has become second nature, often a preferred means of communication to speaking on the phone.

“I text to ask simple questions, and get simple answers,” she says. “Most of my friends don’t even like to check their voicemail.” Her recent phone bill was proof of Osaki’s habit: She had 1,000 text messages on it, she says. That’s more than 30 messages a day.

That’s nothing compared to Lily Brynes, a 17-year-old New Yorker who figures she texts about 100 times a day on weekends, less so during school. It’s almost as if talking on the phone has become awkward, she says — “and my whole generation hates voice mail.”

The teenager adds that even fights are conducted on the phone, in carefully calibrated language. “‘Love you’ — that’s a normal signoff between female friends,” she says. “If she says ‘Love u,’ she’s busy.’” And the initials “l” and “y”? “That means she’s angry.”

Lily’s mother, Karen Binder-Brynes, is in awe. “It’s amazing how this generation has created an entirely new language,” she says. And texting is clearly the territory of the young. The Pew Research survey, conducted in the spring, showed that while 78 percent of all adults own a cell phone, only 24 percent of those over 50 used it to text, and only 6 percent of those over 65.

Moreover, though three-quarters of the 18-29 age group use texting, the number is surely much higher among teenagers, who weren’t counted. Researchers add that U.S. teenagers still lag behind those overseas. An amazing 98 percent of teens in the developed world engage in texting, says Jeff Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

“What Americans don’t realize quite yet is just what a natural, ingrained part of communication texting is,” says Cole. He notes that teenagers in some countries even prefer to write papers and letters on a 12-button phone keypad rather than the usual computer keyboard.

Does this mean that teens of the future will be able to text in their cars, without even looking down at their phones? Not likely. And safety advocates like Messer, in Florida, are pushing their legislatures to adopt bans across the country.

But Osaki, for one, is skeptical that such bans can work.

“I’m not really sure how it could be enforced,” she says. “And I feel like the younger generation is pretty good at getting away with stuff like this. I know how we work.”

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.