California to drivers: Starting Sunday, don’t hold that phone

In Sacramento, where distracted driving has reached dangerous levels, drivers expressed mixed feelings this week about a new state law cracking down on cellphone use by motorists.

Starting Sunday, drivers no longer will be allowed to hold their cellphones in their hands for any reason, including using any of a phone’s apps, such as music playlists.

“The whole idea is you don’t have the phone in your hand, period,” said Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, author of the new law that he says should make it easier for officers to stop and cite drivers for illegal phone use.

Quirk’s bill, AB 1785, plugged what safety officials called a major loophole in the state’s groundbreaking hands-free cellphone laws. Those laws ban talking and texting on handheld phones while driving. But any other hand-held use of a phone, such as shooting videos or scanning Facebook, has been technically legal.

Under the new law, drivers can still use their cellphones if they do it hands-free, which often means voice activated and operated.

However, phones must be mounted on the dashboard or windshield. With the phone mounted, the new law allows drivers to touch the phone once, to “activate or deactivate a feature or function ... with the motion of a single swipe or tap of the driver’s finger.”

The law is designed to stop people from holding their phone for a variety of uses that have become popular in recent years, including checking and posting on Facebook, using Snapchat, scrolling through Spotify or Pandora playlists, typing addresses into the phone’s mapping system, or making videos and taking photos.

A California Office of Traffic Safety study this year determined that one out of every eight drivers on the is paying as much attention to his or a smartphone as to the road. State road safety officials estimate that some form of distracted driving is a factor in 80 percent of crashes. That’s prompted numerous education and enforcement efforts in California aimed at reducing distracted driving.

“Smartphones and apps have made that a very difficult goal,” state traffic safety spokesman Chris Cochran said. “We recognize that it’s not going to be a quick turnaround, but a long haul.”

Few Sacramentans this week said they have heard of the new law, and many said they wonder how enforceable it will be.

James Turner is a Lyft ride-share driver whose phone represents his business lifeblood. It notifies him when someone wants a ride, tells him where to pick up passengers, and maps out the route he should take to deliver riders to their destinations.

He keeps his phone in a holder on his dashboard vent. He’s leery of the law’s impact.

“I’m not sure of the ins and outs of the new law,” Turner said. But he said he thinks he can obey it and still do his job. It takes one tap of a finger to accept a call for service, he said, and he can type in the person’s destination address while parked.

Nevertheless, he said, “How are they going to tell if you swiped (only) once?”

Teenager Carly Lederman, when told about the law this week, said her main concern is whether it inhibits her use of Spotify to access and change her music playlists while driving.

Sitting at Harv’s Car Wash in Sacramento this week, Lederman determined that it took four finger taps to activate her phone, call up Spotify and choose a playlist. Once she has a playlist going, she said, she will be able to skip a song she doesn’t want to hear with one finger touch, but won’t be able to change to a new playlist while driving.

She said she appreciates the basic no-texting law, but questioned why the new law focuses on one area of distracted driving, while being silent on other areas.

“People eat and drive too, and look down at their food,” she said.