Sugar Land’s distracted driving law goes further than most

When I started driving in 1970, the only distractions were the sounds of traffic through my car’s open windows and the irritating replays of the latest Carpenters hit on the local AM pop station.

Today our experience behind the wheel is very different. Some of us think of our cars as rolling workplaces, tricked out with gizmos that enable us to instruct our dashboards to call this or that business contact and get a head start on the day.

Communicating with people who aren’t in the car with us has come to seem essential. When a particular behavior becomes part of our daily routine, we tend to bristle at the prospect of government forbidding us from doing it.

This may explain why surveys show support for distracted driving laws — within limits. Bans on texting, or even on talking on the phone except with a hands-free device, may be acceptable. But most of those surveyed balk at the prospect of complete prohibitions on the use of cellphones by drivers.

It was in this context that Sugar Land became the largest municipality in the Houston area to adopt a distracted driving ordinance. The law, adopted Feb. 21 on a 5-2 vote, provides for fines of up to $500 for texting or talking on the phone while driving unless a handsfree device is used. Emergency calls also are permitted.

Before presenting the measure to the City Council, the Sugar Land Police Department obtained public feedback through comment cards at civic club meetings and an online town hall. Among the hundreds who responded, large majorities supported the option the council ultimately adopted. Far fewer people preferred doing nothing, or passing a law that only banned texting, social media or other applications requiring the use of hands.

Similarly, national surveys show greater support for socalled “hands-free” laws than for complete bans on using phones while driving. It seems intuitively obvious that using your voice — or a thumb on a steering wheel button — to make or answer a call is safer than fumbling with a phone while trying to keep your eyes

on the road.

Our intuition, of course, isn’t always correct. A 2012 report by the nonprofit National Safety Council, summarizing relevant research, concludes that drivers on the phone — even if they’re using hands-free technology — don’t process what they see through the windshield. Their eyes may be on the vehicles around them, but their brain is elsewhere.

Laws such as the one adopted in Sugar Land, the report says, “give the false impression that using a hands-free phone is safe.”

Enforcement difficult

Yet not a single state, according to the safety council, forbids all cell phone use by all drivers. And this option was not among those presented to Sugar Land’s City Council.

“I took that as being extremely problematic with enforcement,” said Assistant Police Chief Scott Schultz, who led the effort to develop Sugar Land’s ordinance.

The law in the Fort Bend County city goes further than many of the roughly 100 local ordinances in Texas, including about nine in the Houston area. Most of these measures just ban texting and similar functions while driving.

Of course, none of these local laws would be necessary if Texas adopted a statewide distracted driving law that applied to all drivers, as 46 other states have done. (Texas bans texting by drivers under 18.)

For the fourth consecutive legislative session, state Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, has filed a bill to forbid texting while driving. One of the previous bills was vetoed by former Gov. Rick Perry; the others never made it through the legislative process.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues: According to the Texas Department of Transportation, 476 people were killed in 2015 on state roads in wrecks where distracted driving was involved. That’s about 13 percent of all roadway fatalities in the state.

Better than no law

Sugar Land Councilwoman Amy Mitchell, who cast one of the two votes against the ordinance, advocated waiting for a statewide law; inconsistent rules, she said, could prove confusing to drivers as they passed from one town to another. The same argument was advanced in Houston, which fooled around for years with texting ban proposals but never got very far.

Few gambles, though, offer lower odds than predicting what the Texas Legislature will do. A limited, local law is not as good as a tough state law, but it’s better than no law. And there’s an easy solution for drivers uncertain what rules apply in a particular location: Don’t use your phone while driving.