Getting thumbs back on the wheel

Calls mount to treat texting on road like drunk driving

Over the last seven years, most places, including Ontario, have banned texting by drivers and public service campaigns have tried an array of tactics to persuade people to put down their phones when they are behind the wheel.

Yet the problem, by just about any measure, appears to be getting worse.

More than one-third of licensed Ontario students in Grades10 to12 — or an estimated 108,000 teens — reported having texted while driving at least once in the past year, according to the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.

For Grade 12 students alone, 46 per cent of drivers say they also texted at least once while behind the wheel.

“This was a big surprise to us,” said Robert Mann, a senior scientist at CAMH in Toronto. “We know that this is a very hazardous behaviour and some of the reports in the literature suggest that texting while you’re driving can increase your chances of being involved in a collision by about 20 times or more.”

(Collisions, both fatal and injurious, declined in Canada between 2010 and 2013, according to a Transport Canada report last year.)

To try to change a distinctly modern behaviour, legislators and publichealth experts are reaching back to an old strategy: they want to treat distracted driving like drunken driving.

Candace Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, has helped found a new group this year, Partnership for Distraction-Free Driving, which is circulating a petition to pressure social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to discourage multi-tasking by drivers, in the same way that Lightner pushed beer and liquor companies to discourage drunken driving.

The most provocative idea, from lawmakers in New York, is to give police officers a new device that is the digital equivalent of the Breathalyzer — a roadside test called the Textalyzer.

It would work like this: an officer arriving at the scene of a crash could ask for the phones of any drivers involved and use the Textalyzer to tap into the operating system to check for recent activity.

The technology could determine whether a driver had used the phone to text, email or do anything else that is forbidden under New York’s hands-free driving laws. Failure to hand over a phone could lead to the suspension of a driver’s licence, similar to the consequences for refusing a breath test.

The proposed legislation faces hurdles to becoming a law, including privacy concerns. But Felix W. Ortiz, a Democratic assemblyman who was a sponsor of the bipartisan Textalyzer bill, said it would not give police access to the contents of any emails or texts. It would simply give them a way to catch multi-tasking drivers, he said.

“We need something on the books where people’s behaviour can change,” said Ortiz, who pushed for the state’s 2001 ban on hand-held devices by drivers. If the Textalyzer bill becomes law, he said, “people are going to be more afraid to put their hands on the cellphone.”

If it were to pass in New York, the first state to propose such an idea, it could well spread in the same way that the hands-free rules did.

Lightner said the intensifying efforts around distracted driving “are the equivalent of the early ’80s” in drunken driving, when pressure led to tougher laws and campaigns emphasizing corporate responsibility.

Distracted driving “is not being treated as seriously as drunk driving, and it needs to be,” she said.

“It’s dangerous, devastating, crippling and it’s a killer . . . and still socially acceptable,” she added.

Deborah Hersman, president of the non-profit National Safety Council and a former chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the Textalyzer-Breathalyzer comparison was apt because looking at and using a phone can be as dangerous as driving drunk.

“Why are we making a distinction between a substance you consume and one that consumes you?” Hersman said.