Boston's public transit authority have announced a plan that will ban all drivers of its trains, trolley cars and buses from carrying mobile phones – this after 49 people were injured when a 24-year-old trolley operator in the city crashed into the rear of another trolley while texting his girlfriend.
Prohibiting public transport drivers from using phones while working sounds perfectly logical. In fact, it seems surprising that such a ban isn't already in place. But in fact, Boston's will be the most restrictive policy in the US.
I'm hoping that others will follow Boston's lead. Because while it's possible to text or even read email on your iPhone while driving, it's not easy or wise to do any of that. Definitive studies have yet to conclude exactly how dangerous those activities are, but anyone who has tried it knows that texting while driving requires a lot more finesse than, say, fiddling with the radio or sipping coffee, which you can do while keeping your eyes on the road (for the most part).
If you're still not convinced, ask 49-year-old Californian Deborah Matis-Engle. She'd been texting when she slammed into a line of cars waiting at a construction zone, causing the vehicle at the end of the line to explode into flames – killing its driver. In April, Matis-Engle was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison. Or look at California, where last September, 25 people were killed and 135 were injured when the engineer of a Los Angeles commuter train collided with a freight train moments after sending a text message.
Experiments have shown that shifting your vision away from the landscape in front of you for even the few seconds that it takes to lift your cup or turn on the local jazz station can result in a crash. In fact, the transportation safety group at the national safety council found that driver inattention is the leading cause of all car accidents, accounting for nearly 80% of them.
US legislators have been relatively vigilant about outlawing text-messaging while driving. It's currently illegal in Washington DC and 10 states – including Virginia, which just passed its law in March. The state of Illinois and the city of Baltimore are considering similar legislation.
On the other hand, only six states, along with Washington, prohibit using a hand-held phone – despite the fact that simply chatting on your phone while driving, even if you use a hands-free device, is as dangerous as getting behind the wheel after a few drinks. A number of studies have disproven the public perception that it's OK for drivers to blab on their cells as long as they use an ear piece. And one such report, conducted by University of Utah psychologists in 2006, found that motorists who talk on their mobiles are just as impaired as drunk drivers.
Now, you might be saying to yourself: Wait a second. Why are virtual conversations riskier than those that take place within the car itself? Good question. One expert I spoke to for another piece on this topic a few years ago told me it's possible that when a driver is talking to someone who's in the car with him or her, the passenger can see or sense when the driver needs to stop conversing and concentrate on the road. When the dialogue is happening over the phone, however, the person on the other end – perhaps a child who's had a bad day at school, a significant other who's angry about something or a depressed friend – may be more demanding of the driver's attention. Every level of government needs to do more to make our roads safe. As the national safety council said in January, all use of cell phones while driving should be prohibited.
If lawmakers around the US heed the council's urgings, they could prevent 636,000 crashes annually – as well as 330,000 injuries, 12,000 serious injuries and 2,600 deaths each year, at a savings of $43bn, according to a recent report from the Harvard Centre of Risk Analysis.
In the words of Janet Froetscher, president and chief executive of the NSC: "Studies show that driving while talking on a cell phone is extremely dangerous and puts drivers at a four times greater risk of a crash.... When our friends have been drinking, we take the car keys away. It's time to take the cell phone away." I'll text to that.
