Cops, lawmakers send message: Dnt txt & drive

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Nicholas Sparks didn’t plan to go swimming on a recent Wednesday morning. But sheriff’s deputies in Niagara County, N.Y., say Sparks found himself — and his tow truck — in a backyard pool July 29 after he rear-ended a car and screeched off the road at high speed.

Sparks, 25, of Burt, N.Y., is charged with reckless driving, talking on a cell phone and following too closely in the incident, which left the 68-year-old woman whose car he allegedly hit briefly hospitalized with head injuries and slightly injured his 8-year-old grandniece, who was with him in the truck.

As it happens, deputies say, Sparks was using two cell phones at the same time — talking on one and sending text messages on the other. But he faces charges only for talking, because while it’s illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving in New York, it won’t explicitly be illegal to send text messages on one until Nov. 1, when a law passed last week takes effect.

Numerous localities have text-driving bans, some limited to novice drivers or vehicles passing through school zones. But the practice is prohibited for all drivers statewide in only 10 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, an organization of state highway officials that endorsed nationwide prohibitions this week.

Momentum is gathering to stamp out the practice, however. By January, New York and eight other states will have joined the list when laws awaiting enactment go into effect.

Utah’s legislature has taken one of the toughest stances, passing a law that imposes a penalty of up to 15 years in prison on texting drivers who cause an accident that kills someone.

Risk research only now emerging
It might seem obvious that using a cell phone would be a distraction for a driver, but only recently has a large body of research emerged to demonstrate it. There is even less research examining the specific risk of typing out text messages.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that in 2002 that a quarter-million accidents and 955 deaths could be attributed to drivers’ use of cell phones, either texting or talking. That research was finally obtained by safety activists last month under the Freedom of Information Act — after it had sat on the shelf for years, The New York Times reported, because of concerns that publishing it might appear to be an act of political lobbying.

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It was not until last month that the first large-scale research on “driving while intexticated” — sending text messages while behind the wheel — appeared.

That study, by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, concluded that the risk of an accident was four times greater for a driver typing out a text message than for a driver dialing a cell phone — and more than 23 times greater than for a driver who wasn’t distracted by a phone at all.

“This cellphone task has the potential to create a true crash epidemic if texting-type tasks continue to grow in popularity and the generation of frequent text message senders reach driving age in large numbers,” the report warned.

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Numbers like that are lending support to safety experts and activists who, until recently, could only point to smaller studies and the vivid retelling of horrific texting-related accidents to make their case, like the crash in Ontario County, N.Y., that killed five high school classmates less than a week after they graduated in June 2007.

“This is a huge problem in America,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has scheduled a “summit” later this month to study texting and other activities that distract drivers. “If it were up to me, I would ban drivers from texting immediately.”

Fifth of drivers text behind the wheel
Lahood can’t do that, however. The U.S. Senate is considering legislation that would withhold federal highway funds from states that don’t ban text-driving, but that would still leave the final decision up to local and state legislators. And they’re the ones who hear from constituents who oppose a ban.

Some disagree with the idea itself, like Brad McCarter, 19, a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who said Missouri’s new law against texting by drivers under 21 was hypocritical.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KNST of Topeka, Kan.; KOMU of Columbia, Mo.; KSL of Salt Lake City, Utah; WBIR of Knoxville, Tenn.; and WSMV of Nashville, Tenn.

“Oh, it’s dangerous,” McCarter said of text-driving. “But so is doing your makeup or fishing around in your glove compartment or console.”

Peter Kissinger, chief executive of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, said that was a common attitude, especially among younger drivers who grew up with thumbs blazing across mobile phone keyboards.

In a survey by the foundation in April, 21 percent of respondents admitted having used their cell phones to send or read a text message while behind the wheel in the previous month, even as 87 percent listed text-driving as a “very serious threat” — second only to drunken driving and far ahead of other hazards like aggressive driving and speeding.

Overall, 95 percent said they thought messaging while driving was “unacceptable,” but even 18 percent of those drivers said they had done it recently. Rolayne Fairclough, a spokeswoman for AAA of Utah, said that showed a big “disconnect” between “what people know is dangerous and what they actually do.”

Kissinger put it more simply: “That’s outrageous to me.”

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