Articles Posted in Distracted Driving

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been reminding Oregonians since last year of the importance of the Oregon distracted driving law that went into effect January 1. An ever-growing number of studies nationwide testify to the importance of concentration behind the wheel and the particular dangers posed by hand-held cellphones.

Last week saw a Portland car crash that highlighted these truths in an exceptionally ironic manner. According to a report on KPTV’s website a Portland driver who was talking on his cellphone rear-ended a police car. OK, it was an unmarked patrol car, not a marked cruiser. Still, if you are going to have an accident while violating the Oregon distracted law, getting collared because you hit a cop car does tend to make things look even worse.

According to KPTV the accident took place on I-205 near Foster Road early last Tuesday morning. The 70-year old driver of a Toyota was, according to police quoted by the TV station, heading south on the interstate while using his cellphone without a hands-free device when he rear-ended the police car as it cruised along at 55 miles per hour.

In a sign of the ever-growing concern with distracted driving, a San Antonio bus driver has been convicted of reckless driving for texting while behind the wheel. His city bus, moving at 34 miles per hour according to police testimony, rear-ended an SUV in rush hour traffic, according to a report in the San Antonio Express-News. After watching footage from an on-board surveillance camera that showed the driver checking and sending texts on his cellphone for a full six minutes leading up to the June 2008 accident, Jurors returned a guilty verdict in just 10 minutes.

Prosecutors are requesting jail time for the driver (he could face up to 30 days), saying he should be made an example of the dangers of how reckless distracted driving is. Sentencing is scheduled to take place in November.

The conviction is significant, in part, because texting while behind the wheel is not, in and of itself, illegal in Texas, as it is here in Oregon. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety bus drivers are, legally speaking, perfectly free to text while they drive in Texas so long as no passengers age 17 or younger are on board (which presumably rules out texting by school bus operators, but leaves municipal bus drivers in the clear). Prosecutors, however, argued successfully that texting is so obviously dangerous an activity that doing so while driving fits any reasonable standard of reckless driving, according to the Express-News.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that distracted driving would one day be linked to the death of someone famous. Thus have celebrity watchers this week been obsessed with the Southern California car accident that claimed the life of Dr. Frank Ryan, a cosmetic surgeon well-known for operating on well-known people.

The initial reports of Ryan’s death were relatively straightforward: “The California Highway Patrol says Ryan’s 1995 Jeep Wrangler went off the side of Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu and landed on its roof Monday afternoon,” the Associated Press reported. It did not take long, however, for the nature of the story to change. Soon many media outlets were noting that California authorities are considering whether the car crash “was a result of distracted driving from texting and tweeting at the wheel,” according to a report by CBS News. According to CBS, Ryan “was sending pictures and updates to his twitter page” only “moments” before the fatal car accident.

As it is here in Oregon, texting while driving is illegal in California. Does it take the death of someone (moderately) famous to force home the message that texting while driving – even in places where it is legal (and, to repeat, that does not include either California or Oregon) is among the more insanely dangerous things one can do while also trying to operate a speeding car?

A study published earlier this month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project documents what many of us probably knew in our hearts: distracted driving is more than just a teen problem. Following up the Project’s 2009 study of teens and distracted driving, the new report finds that “one in four American adults say they have texted while driving”. In fact, the proportion for adults who acknowledge having engaged in this especially dangerous activity – 27% – is basically the same as the percentage of teens – 26% – who acknowledge doing so.

Perhaps more shocking is the fact that 17% of all adults acknowledge having been so distracted “while talking or texting that they have physically bumped into another person or object” while behind the wheel.

As I have noted in a number of previous posts on Portland distracted driving, Oregon is one of a growing number of states that are attempting to crack down on the practice through legislation. With a small number of exceptions, Oregon distracted driving became illegal throughout the state at the beginning of this year. In a society where, according to the study, 82% of Americans over age 18 now own a cellphone and 58% of them text, distracted driving is likely to continue growing as an issue.

As I have noted in a number of previous posts, the new Oregon distracted driving law which came into effect this year allows for “primary enforcement”. That means Oregon police officers can pull drivers over for talking on a handheld cellphone. In some other states, where primary enforcement is not the rule, police must first have noted another offense (speeding, for example, or reckless driving) and may then ticket cellphone use or texting as a secondary, or additional, charge after making the initial traffic stop.

While there is relatively little Oregon distracted driving data available so far (the law has not yet been in force for six months), anecdotal evidence suggests that few of the state’s police departments have made a strong primary enforcement push regarding the distracted driving law.

That, however, may be beginning to change. As the Siuslaw News reports, Florence officials have come to believe that the cellphone ban is not being taken sufficiently seriously. City police issued more than 55 warnings for violations of the Oregon distracted driving law last month alone. The paper quotes the police chief: “That’s way too many for a town our size,” and indicates that officers intend to begin cracking down.

Late last month I summarized the key findings of a New York Times article on the latest gadgets available to Oregon drivers and designed to combat distracted driving. Products like this have become increasingly important since the Oregon distracted driving law went into effect in January. As a Portland distracted driving attorney I’ve worked hard to keep on top of both the technological and legal sides of this fast-developing area of the law.

As I noted last month, one barrier to effective high-tech solutions combating Portland distracted driving is what has become known as the “passenger problem”: if your anti-distracted driving app works mainly by disabling all or part of your phone while the car is in motion (as determined by the phone’s GPS), how does that effect someone who is riding in the car but is not behind the wheel? Cutting down on Portland injury car crashes linked to distracted driving is a priority for everyone – but it is also a reality of modern life that not everyone making calls or texting from a moving car is behind the wheel.

My earlier post noted that different products deal with this issue in different ways. I mentioned that one product, Zoomsafer, allowed users to bypass its call blocking functions by completing a timed puzzle – presumably one too difficult to attempt while driving. Shortly after publishing that blog, however, I received an email from ZoomSafer’s Marketing Manager, Eleanor Jones, which reads, in part:

“Users cannot bypass ZoomSafer’s software by successfully completing a timed puzzle. We believe that such a mechanism is incredibly dangerous as it encourages drivers determined to flout the block to completely disregard the road in order to regain access to their phones’ texting functions.”
The system, she writes, does have a “passenger mode” which, in effect, puts “the automatic speed detection on ‘snooze’.” This, frankly, is good news, if only because lack of some route around the passenger problem threatens to emerge as a major barrier to adoption of anti-distracted driving devices in Oregon and elsewhere around the country. We are probably still a year or so away from having good statistical data on the new Oregon distracted driving ban and its effectiveness, but high tech solutions designed to address user’s concerns while keeping them safe seem like a very good start.

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Two months ago I wrote about “Textecution”, a smartphone application available for phones using Google’s Android operating system. At the time I noted that the application’s approach – using a phone’s GPS capabilities to determine whether the user is in a moving vehicle and, if so, to turn off some or all of a handset’s functions – seemed to be the wave of the future.

Sure enough, barely eight weeks later, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue has published a detailed review of four similar applications, all of which seek to address the growing problem of distracted driving. Textecution was not among the applications reviewed this week by Pogue. All of the ones he did look at, however, take a similar approach.

As Pogue notes, iZup, tXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer approach the problem of Oregon distracted driving in differing ways but seem to be aimed at the same market: parents of teenagers (or perhaps to bosses who fear that employees on the phone while using the company vehicle will cause an Oregon car accident leading to a lawsuit). Aside from ZoomSafer, all of the applications reviewed require a monthly subscription fee. Purchase prices range from free (for iZup, though, again, there is a monthly fee) to $25.