Top mayoral aide embraces texting-&- driving crackdown
A top mayoral aide on Thursday embraced an aldermanic plan to use technology to crack down on a deadly epidemic: texting while driving.
Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld said texting while driving is “one of the most common distracted driving issues” and one of the “top five causes of traffic crashes,” killing hundreds of people a year and seriously injuring thousands.
“I was pleased to see the support from aldermen . . . to bring these issues to light and continue to find ways to address a growing concern,” she said.
Scheinfeld said the device known as a “Textalyzer” is “something the Police Department needs to weigh in on. That would be part of their enforcement practices as proposed. But certainly any additional tools we can have to curb this problem would be welcome.”
The resolution championed by Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke ( 14th) and Transportation Committee Chairman Anthony Beale ( 9th) asks the Chicago Police Department to explore the possibility of using a “Textalyzer” to detect whether motorists involved in injury- related accidents had been distracted by their cellphones before the crash occurred.
It’s the brainchild of a New York father who turned his grief to action, leading to a push to fight distracted driving with tools similar to those used to combat drunken driving.
“We need to do something. . . . So many teens are in accidents, being killed. The numbers are up drastically because this texting thing is out of control,” Beale said Thursday.
“We tried working with T- Mobile, AT& T, Verizon. There is technology out there that can shut down a phone if you’re going a certain speed. We’ve asked them to roll that out to help save lives,” he said. “But there’s a resistance to do that. Hopefully, this will get their attention to do something.”
The “Textalyzer” being developed by the Israeli mobile forensics company Cellebrite is still in the prototype stage and has yet to be implemented anywhere, but legislators are considering the idea in several states.
A bill under consideration in New York would let officers use the company’s tablet, which connects to a driv- er’s phone, to determine if the person had been typing or swiping on their phone within minutes of a crash — without giving police access to the contents of the phone.
For Scheinfeld, the proposal is particularly welltimed. She has called the traffic crashes that seriously injure five people in Chicago every day, and kill someone every three days, a “persistent plague” that has created a “true public health crisis.”
She’s about to unveil a “Vision Zero” campaign that’s expected to use video surveillance and targeted enforcement crackdowns to reduce the number of accidents on Chicago streets.
“We should not, as a society, accept that traffic crashes are an inevitable part of life in the big city or anywhere across the country,” she said Thursday.
“We should continue to be generating ideas to be eliminating this scourge through — not only technology, but through our built environment, through our community organizations, through our public awareness and through enforcement. [ Vision Zero is] gonna be a combination of all of those things.”
Chicago Sun- Times columnist Michael Sneed reported Thursday that the Chicago Police Department issued only 168 citations for the improper use of mobile devices last year, down from 45,672 in 2014.
Scheinfeld said she has no idea why so few tickets have been issued at a time when distracted driving — and distracted walking, for that matter — are on the rise.
Contributing: Mitchell Armentrout