Texas texting law loopholes: ‘the lesser of all evils’

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini readily admits the Texas Legislature passed a flawed ban on texting while driving.

Zaffirini, D-Laredo, spent a decade trying to pass a ban that forbids anyone from typing away behind the wheel. What Texas has is a ban on sending or reading electronic communications while driving, though motorists can go right ahead controlling their stereo or typing in an address to their navigation app.

The carve-outs make it almost impossible to enforce the ban, nearly everyone agrees, but Zaffirini said they were necessary to get the bill through the Senate.

“If we hadn’t done that, we would not have passed the bill,” she said. “It was the lesser of all evils.”

It is a start, many supporters said, even if enforcement has not lived up to expectations. While not everything she hoped for, she said it is a positive step and already yielding results.

“I know many, many people who have stopped texting and driving because it is against the law,” she said.

Zaffirini said she expects a flurry of bills to toughen the law during the upcoming session.

History, however, is not on the side of swift action from lawmakers, who long have called cellphone bans evidence of a nanny state taking hold in freedom-loving Texas. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle also have bristled at the implication of giving police statewide more authority to pull people over because they think they see them doing something dangerous.

Before the 2017 ban passed, the closest Zaffirini and others, notably Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, had come was in 2011, only to have the bill fall to then-Gov. Rick Perry’s veto. Perry said he favored education, calling the ban “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.”

Texas also remains one of the most lenient states for phone use, with some lawmakers trying to strip cities of the authority to ban all phone use while driving. Lawmakers have restricted adult drivers from using cellphones only in school zones and have quibbled about requirements for signs before citations can be upheld. Only novice drivers under 18 face any statewide, universal ban on phone use.

In other legislative sessions, bills outlawing texting or all handheld phone use failed to garner enough votes in committees to move on to the House and Senate floors, or did not even get a hearing.

Despite the concerns, there is growing consensus the laws can be written smartly to reduce crashes — thus saving lives. States with a cellphone ban where police can pull over people they see on their phones saw “significant reductions,” said Alva O. Ferdinand, an assistant professor at the Texas A&M School of Public Health who has studied textingwhile-driving crashes extensively.

In Georgia, lawmakers recently saw road fatalities rise 33 percent from 2014 to 2016 — the highest number the state had weathered in a decade. The state also saw increases in auto insurance rates over those years were more than twice the national average.

The state, which had a texting ban, instituted a new hands-free law in July, prohibiting drivers from holding a phone in their hand or with their body, writing, sending or reading any text-based communication, or watching videos or movies on a phone or similar device.

“A lot of people were afraid (and said) the government should not legislate this,” said Georgia state Rep. John Carson, a Republican, the bill’s author. “But when you do that, you’re relying on the personal accountability of drivers who don’t think they’re dangerous at all, until after they have an accident.”

Traffic deaths dropped 2.5 percent in the first month after the law’s passage and 8.9 percent in the following month, he said. Overall, traffic deaths are down 11 percent, which Carson attributes to the publicity surrounding the new legislation.

Eventually, Zaffirini said she expects Texas to get there, as it did when it took years for bills to ban smoking in buildings and near entrances to take hold. Things, and opinions, change, she said.

“Thirty years ago, you saw parents driving with their children on their laps,” Zaffirni said, remembering a time before child restraint was not law. “You don’t see that anymore. It would be considered by some child abuse today.”