too dangerous to be allowed, federal safety investigators declared
Tuesday, urging all states to impose total bans except for
emergencies.
Inspired by recent deadly crashes — including one in which a teenager
sent or received 11 text messages in 11 minutes before an accident —
the recommendation would apply even to hands-free devices, a much
stricter rule than any current state law.
The unanimous recommendation by the five-member National
Transportation Safety Board would make an exception for devices deemed
to aid driver safety such as GPS navigation systems.
A group representing state highway safety offices called the
recommendation "a game-changer."
"States aren't ready to support a total ban yet, but this may start
the discussion," Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors
Highway Safety Association, said.
NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman acknowledged the recommendation would be
unpopular with many people and that complying would involve changing
what has become ingrained behavior for many Americans.
While the NTSB doesn't have the power to impose restrictions, its
recommendations carry significant weight with federal regulators and
congressional and state lawmakers. Another recommendation issued
Tuesday urges states to aggressively enforce current bans on text
messaging and the use of cellphones and other portable electronic
devices while driving.
"We're not here to win a popularity contest," she said. "No email, no
text, no update, no call is worth a human life."
Currently, 35 states and the District of Columbia ban texting while
driving, while nine states and D.C. bar hand-held cellphone use.
Thirty states ban all cellphone use for beginning drivers. But
enforcement is generally not a high priority, and no states ban the
use of hands-free devices for all drivers.
A total cellphone ban would be the hardest to accept for many people.
Leila Noelliste, 26, a Chicago blogger and business owner, said being
able to talk on the cellphone "when I'm running around town" is
important to self-employed people like herself.
"I don't think they should ban cellphones because I don't think you're
really distracted when you're talking, it's when you're texting," she
said. When you're driving and talking, "your eyes are still on the
road."
The immediate impetus for the recommendation of state bans was a
deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Mo., last year in which a
19-year-old pickup driver sent and received 11 texts in 11 minutes
just before the accident.
NTSB investigators said they are seeing increasing texting, cellphone
calls and other distracting behavior by drivers in accidents involving
all kinds of transportation. It has become routine to immediately
request the preservation of cellphone and texting records when an
investigation is begun.
In the past few years the board has investigated a train collision in
which the engineer was texting that killed 25 people in Chatsworth,
Calif.; a fatal accident on the Delaware River near Philadelphia in
which a tugboat pilot was talking on his cellphone and using a laptop
computer, and a Northwest Airlines flight that sped more than 100
miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their
laptops.
Last year, a driver was dialing his cellphone when his truck crossed a
highway median near Munfordville, Ky., and collided with a
15-passenger van. Eleven people were killed.
The board said the initial collision in the Missouri accident was
caused by the inattention of the pickup driver who was texting a
friend about events of the previous night. The pickup, traveling at 55
mph, hit the back of a tractor truck that had slowed for highway
construction. The pickup was rear-ended by a school bus that overrode
the smaller vehicle. A second school bus rammed into the back of the
first bus.
The pickup driver and a 15-year-old student on one of the buses were
killed. Thirty-eight other people were injured. About 50 students,
mostly members of a high school band from St. James, Mo., were on the
buses heading to the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park.
Missouri had a law banning drivers under 21 years old from texting
while driving at the time of the crash, but wasn't aggressively
enforcing the ban, board member Robert Sumwalt said.
"Without the enforcement, the laws don't mean a whole lot," he said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported earlier
this year that pilot projects in Syracuse, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn.,
produced significant reductions in distracted driving by combining
stepped-up ticketing with high-profile public education campaigns.
Before and after each enforcement wave, NHTSA researchers observed
cellphone use by drivers and conducted surveys at drivers' license
offices in the two cities. They found that in Syracuse, hand-held
cellphone use and texting declined by a third. In Hartford, there was
a 57 percent drop in hand-held phone use, and texting behind the wheel
dropped by nearly three-quarters.
However, that was with blanket enforcement by police.
The board's decision to include hands-free cellphone use in its
recommendation is likely to prove especially controversial. No states
currently ban hand-free use although many studies show that it is
often as unsafe as hand-held phone use because drivers' minds are on
their conversations rather than what's happening on the road.
Hersman pointed to an Alexandria, Va., accident the board investigated
in which a bus driver talking on a hands-free phone ran into a bridge
despite his being familiar with the route and the presence of warning
signs that the arch was too low for his bus to clear. The roof of the
bus was sheared off.
The board has previously recommended bans on texting and cellphone use
by commercial truck and bus drivers and beginning drivers, but it had
stopped short of calling for a ban on the use of the devices by adults
behind the wheel of passenger cars.
The problem of texting while driving is getting worse despite a rush
by states to ban the practice, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
said last week. In November, Pennsylvania became the 35th state to
forbid texting while driving.
About two out of 10 American drivers overall — and half of drivers
between 21 and 24 — say they've thumbed messages or emailed from the
driver's seat, according to a survey of more than 6,000 drivers by the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
However, the survey found that many drivers don't think it's dangerous
when they do it — only when others do.
At any given moment last year on America's streets and highways,
nearly one in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the
Web or otherwise using a hand-held electronic device, the safety
administration said. Those activities were up 50 percent over the
previous year.
Driver distraction wasn't the only significant safety problem
uncovered by NTSB's investigation of the Missouri accident.
Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from
fatigue that may have eroded his judgment. He had an average of about
five-and-a-half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the
accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before
the accident, they said.
The pickup driver had no history of accidents or traffic violations,
investigators said.
Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both
school buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a
hospital after the accident to pick up students crashed in the
hospital parking lot when that bus' brakes failed.
However, the brake problems didn't cause or contribute to the severity
of the accident, investigators said.
Another issue involved the difficulty passengers had getting out of
the first school bus after the accident. Its doors were unusable and
passengers had to exit through an emergency window. The raised latch
on the window kept catching on clothing as students tried to escape,
investigators said. Escape was further slowed because the window
design required one person to hold the window up in order for a second
person to crawl through, they said.
It was critical for passengers to leave as quickly as possible because
a large amount of fuel underneath the bus was a serious fire hazard,
investigators said.
"It could have been a much worse situation if there was a fire,"
Donald Karol, the NTSB's highway safety director, said.
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