Safety advocates drive to halt texting at wheel
Christopher Behnan
Livingston Daily.com - September 20, 2009

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Fowlerville High School sophomore Jessica Lloyd has learned the inherent dangers of texting while driving the hard way, but not by her own doing.


Lloyd, 14, was on a stopped school bus in late January when a driver — later found to be texting at the time — rear-ended the bus with a truck.

Since January, Lloyd has had a bulging disc in her back and endured four weeks of physical therapy. The lower-back pain recently resurfaced, this time worse than before.

Her family continues to deal with mounting medical bills related to her injuries. Meanwhile, Lloyd is preparing to take driver’s training in the coming months.

While a harsh ordeal, the experience was a lesson of sorts as Lloyd prepares to earn her driver’s license and eventually get behind the wheel herself.

“I don’t want to take the chance of hitting someone or hitting a school bus because I’m trying to text somebody or not paying attention to the road,” she said.

Situations like Lloyd’s have become more commonplace as drivers continue to take their eyes off the road to focus on tiny buttons on hand-held digital devices.

Texting while driving has led to even more disastrous situations.

Lockport, N.Y., police officials learned a tow-truck driver was texting with one hand and talking on his cell phone with the other when he rear-ended a car, throwing the car off the roadway and into a house. The tow truck came to a stop nose-first in the homeowner’s swimming pool.

The video was broadcast on Fox News.

By far, teenagers are the most likely drivers to be texting while behind the wheel, local police officials said.

AAA Michigan’s most recent driving-while-texting statistics come from a survey of 1,000 drivers ages 16 and 17. Survey results showed that 61 percent of those surveyed admitted to risky driving habits, and of that percentage 46 percent reported texting at the wheel.
Local impact

Livingston County highway and local road patrols said there are a growing number of crashes, speeding and other violations linked to texting behind the wheel.

Livingston County Sheriff Bob Bezotte said 75 percent of drivers on Grand River Avenue at any given time are either talking on their cell phones or texting, and that the majority of those who drive and text in the county are young, female drivers.

Personnel at the Brighton post of the Michigan State Police believe a hit-and-run accident last week on Old U.S. 23 in Brighton Township was tied to the at-fault driver texting while driving.

The victim told police the man driving the other car was looking down in his lap as if he was texting. The at-fault driver then swerved, collided with the victim’s car in a sideswipe fashion and left the scene, said Sgt. Mark Thompson.

“It’s a growing thing. For better or for worse, the technology is there and people are (opening) themselves to it, and it’s happening,” Thompson said.

Bezotte said his department deals with drivers texting while driving, in one form or another, every day.

Bezotte said drivers swerving into other lanes and looking down are clear indicators to his deputies that people are texting.

“I can’t believe that people are actually texting while they’re driving. That’s gross negligence,” he said.

“We’ve gone from everybody being on the cell phone and trying to deal with the phone while driving, and now it’s texting,” Bezotte added.

While police can’t directly cite drivers for texting, in some cases they can bump up charges to careless driving if the investigation shows texting was a factor, Bezotte said.

For example, someone responsible for a rear-end collision would normally be cited for failure to have a vehicle under control or failure to yield right of way. If a cell phone was in use at the time of the crash, police can increase the charge to careless driving, which brings greater fines and a 4-point license violation.

Both Bezotte and Thompson said they weren’t aware of any fatal accidents in which a driver was texting.

There are several pending bills in Lansing that would ban texting while driving in Michigan. In most cases, the penalties would arise as secondary citations when a driver is pulled over for a separate violation or after a crash.

By the numbers

Highway officials point to a recent study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute as the most accurate representation of how texting is contributing to crashes.

The study, issued in July, involved the installation of cameras in the vehicles of participants, then tracked them for more than 6 million miles.

The participants, who drove both light vehicles and trucks, engaged in texting and talking on cell phones as they drove.

The study concluded that text messaging was associated with the highest risk for crashes of all cell phone tasks, and that teenagers are four times more likely to get into crashes linked to cell phone applications than adults.

The study showed the risk of crashes for truck drivers who text behind the wheel was 23.2 times higher than those not distracted while driving.

The state Office of Highway Safety Planning, a civilian division of the MSP, has tracked cell phone use related to crashes for several years by reviewing accident reports. A box was recently added to crash forms to indicate if phone use was an issue in a crash.

The statistics suggest such crashes are rare because it’s often left to drivers to report whether they were using cell phones at the time of the crash, said Anne Readett, office spokeswoman.

The forms don’t indicate whether the driver was talking or texting, making it that much harder to track texting trends.

“It’s something we believe is underreported because in almost all cases, people don’t want to volunteer information that wouldn’t put them in the best light in the event of a crash. It’s been an area that we’ve been monitoring,” Readett said.

The real message

Police and other safety advocates are searching for new and better ways to drive home the message that texting behind the wheel is a potentially fatal choice.

Perhaps the most well-known — and graphic — example is a short film produced by the Heddlu Gwent Police in Wales, United Kingdom.

The police force there created a four-minute film that begins with a car full of teenage girls, with the driver texting messages. The driver, distracted, collides head-on with an oncoming car and then is struck from the side by yet another vehicle.

The collisions result in the bloody deaths of the driver’s two friends, the parents of a child and an infant in the back seat of the second car, and serious injuries to those in the third car.

Some safety advocates are encouraging educators to use the video as a teaching tool for young or up-and-coming drivers.

While some have complained the video goes too far to prove its point, Bezotte said it accurately shows the worst-case scenario of texting while driving.

“For me, it’s just right because I can’t tell you how many times young people have been in traffic accidents and you talk to them and they don’t comprehend,” he said.
“They just don’t understand what’s at stake,” he added.

The state Office of Highway Safety Planning is preparing to launch a campaign to create and distribute educational materials to discourage drivers from texting while on the road, Readett said.

She said there is no clear-cut way to help drivers change their behavior on the road, much like the difficulty that comes with changing eating and exercise habits.

Safety advocates are reaching out to drivers through the Internet and the latest digital applications.

One advocate against texting on the road, Cricket Wireless, actually makes money by people texting.

The wireless company recently launched the Practice Safe Text campaign, which aims to inform drivers in Utah about that state’s new law that makes texting while driving illegal.

There are at least a handful of Twitter pages that disburse messages discouraging people from texting on the road.