News
Email
Print
Train wreck puts focus on peril of text messaging
Though it is popular with adults 18 to 29, only five states ban all drivers from doing it at the wheel
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: September 17, 2008
One day last summer, Jim Messer, a Florida lawyer, 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 got to be a law against this," Messer thought. But there wasn't -- not in his state, anyway.
Despite a general belief on the part of researchers and authorities that texting at the wheel, like other driver distractions, could be jeopardizing lives, just five states and the District of Columbia ban all drivers from doing it.
Now investigators are looking into whether texting may have played a role in the disastrous California train wreck last week 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 wreck.
For now, there are no data directly tying text messaging to traffic accidents, though 74 percent of Americans 18 to 29 use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center.
But a government study in 2006 found that distracted drivers of all sorts were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-wrecks. And everyone knows that checking e-mail 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 that the risk of a wreck 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," said Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS.
But it is hard to prove, in the aftermath of a wreck, 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 vehicle hit a tractor-trailer in June last year, killing her and four friends who had all just graduated from high school. But they could not tell whether she had been 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 ban all drivers from texting, according to the IIHS. Twelve other states, including North Carolina, have partial bans, such as drivers under 18 or bus drivers.
Liz Osaki, 23, who works at an advertising agency outside Boston, texts at the wheel, though mostly when she is in traffic, or stopped at a light. Even when she is not, she says, "I promise I am still looking at the road."
The only mishaps that Osaki reports are occasionally missing the moment that the light turns from red to green, or not realizing as fast as she should that cars in front have braked suddenly. She says that texting can 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."
Email
Print
ADVERTISEMENT
N.C. Politics
Federal Politics
Advertisement
