Advocates Petition for Anti-Texting Rule
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 6, Issue 5, October 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. – R U txtN? If you are driving an 18-wheeler, the Advocates for Highway Safety wants you to stop. Late last month, the consumer safety group raised the ante on distracted drivers by asking the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to prohibit or restrict electronic devices that divert commercial drivers’ attention.
Advocates petitioned the FMCSA to immediately open a rulemaking to review the most current research on distracted driving, determine which electronic devices and technologies distract commercial drivers and then consider prohibiting them. The Advocates petition says anything that takes drivers off their primary task must be considered – cell phones and hands-free remotes, global positioning systems, texting and entertainment devices – for a ban or a severe restriction. The group asked that first responders, such as police and emergency medical technicians be exempted and that exceptions be made for operators using electronic devices to summon help during an emergency. Finally, the petition requested that any rule apply to all commercial motor vehicle drivers – including bus drivers covered by the FMCSA – and that violations automatically result in an Out of Service order – meaning the driver is prohibited from operating a commercial truck for a specified period of time.
The petition comes on the heels of a number of initiatives to halt the growing use of on-board electronic devices that threaten highway safety. Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a report on fatalities and injuries in distracted driving-involved crashes. Using the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the General Estimates System and other data sources, NHTSA found that 5,870 individuals died and about 515,000 occupants in 2008 were injured in police-reported crashes in which at least one form of driver distraction was reported. According to An Examination of Driver Distraction as Recorded in NHTSA Databases, that accounted for 16 percent of all fatal crashes and an estimated 22 percent of injury crashes. Not surprisingly the largest percent of distracted drivers were the under-20 age group – comprising 16 percent of all drivers in fatal crashes in which distraction was reported. (The next largest group was 20-29-year-olds, with 12 percent.) NHTSA researchers believe those figures to be undercounts:
“While these numbers are significant, they may not state the true size of the problem, since the identification of distraction and its role in the crash by law enforcement can be very difficult,” the researchers wrote in the report.
The agency presented this research at NHTSA’s two-day distracted driver summit earlier this month. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has been an outspoken critic of distracted driving, but NHTSA can not regulate driver behavior, only on-board devices that are part of a vehicle’s OE electronics. So far it has declined to do so.
NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson says that the agency has looked at the issue in the past – specifically original equipment navigation systems that were proliferating in new vehicles – to understand what impact they were having on safety, but came to no conclusions on regulating them.
“We’re continuing to monitor the original equipment devices being installed, but we haven’t had any serious discussions about any type of regulation,” he says. For now, the agency is taking a role it’s played in the past on other issues, such as seat belt use, drunk driving, and inexperienced drivers. “We can help the states by doing research and providing guidance to make good decisions on their own.”
The gathering included presentations on distracted driver research and legislative efforts to eliminate some forms of driver distractions – most frequently texting. According to a presentation by Vernon Betkey of the Governors Highway Safety Association, more than 200 distracted driving bills have been weighed in 43 states; 18 and the District of Columbia have enacted texting bans. On the federal level, the Avoiding Life-Endangering and Reckless Texting by Drivers (ALERT Drivers) Act of 2009, S. 1536 and H.R. 3535 has been introduced by New York U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. The measure has been referred to committee in both chambers.
Distracted driving among truckers also made the National Transportation Safety Board ‘s 2009 Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements. The NTSB was prompted by investigations into six fatal crashes involving bus drivers or young, inexperienced drivers, in which distraction caused the crash. It specifically wants the FMSCA to “prohibit cellular telephone use by commercial drivers of school buses and motorcoaches, except in emergencies.”
Advocates’ petition points out that large commercial trucks are represented disproportionately in fatal crashes – representing about three percent of all motor vehicle registrations, but eight percent of all fatal motor vehicle crashes and 12 percent of all traffic fatalities each year.
“One of every nine (9) motor vehicle fatalities in the U.S. each year is the result of a large truck crash,” the petition argued.
Advocates also pointed out that research conducted by the Virginia Tech University Transportation Research Institute at the FMCSA’s behest found, that driver distraction was involved in 81 percent of “safety-critical events.” The Virginia Tech study used naturalistic data collection in which 100 commercial drivers served as subjects over 18 months and 735,000 miles of driving. Using in-vehicle cameras and instruments, the researchers studied professional drivers behavior while using dispatching devices, laptop computers, calculators; maps, cell phones; eating and drinking, and adjusting equipment. In regards to cell phone use, the researchers paid particular attention to how much time a task – dialing, talking, listening texting and reaching for a cell phone –distracted the driver from watching the road. The findings, released in July, showed that drivers dialing a cell phone had a 5.9 times greater risk of crashing and those reaching for any electronic device were 6.7 times more likely to have a crash. Text messaging while driving a truck was the most hazardous activity, increasing the crash risk by nearly 24 times non-distracted driving. This activity also took drivers’ eyes from the road the longest – 4.6 seconds over a 6-second interval.
“This equates to a driver traveling the length of a football field at 55 mph without looking at the roadway,” the researchers said in a news release.
VA Tech researchers concluded: “Texting should be banned in moving vehicles for all drivers…This cell phone 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.”