Drivers across America now face a total ban against the use of their cell phones while driving in light of safety concerns about distractions while on the road.
In a surprisingly bold move, transportation safety regulators urged a nation-wide ban of mobile devices behind the wheel, going so far as to say they should never be used in cars unless in case of emergency. A fatal car crash that left two teens dead in Missouri was largely due to a driver texting while driving. The driver and a girl in a school bus both died in the crash.
The National Transportation Board said Tuesday that states should ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, even including hands-free devices.
Fatal: The multi-car pile up near
uggs boots onsale Gray Summit, Missouri in August 2010 when a 19-year-old driver crashed into a slowed car just after he either sent or received 11 text messages in the 11 minutes prior to the accident
The board made the radical recommendation following a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Missouri last year when a 19-year-old pickup driver Daniel Schatz and 15-year-old student Jessica Brinker both died in the crash.
Daniel was driving his GMC pickup truck and sent or received 11 texts in the 11 minutes immediately before the crash, prompting the proposed ban.
The pickup, travelling at 55 miles per hour, collided into the back of a tractor truck before the pickup was rear-ended by a school bus that overrode the smaller vehicle, and a second school bus rammed into the back of the first bus.
THE BAN: WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
The NTSB is a federal agency,
ugg winter boots meaning that it does not have the power or ability to actually enforce these recommendations, or even start the process of turning them into law.
They are, however, taken very seriously by legislators.
In their recommendations Tuesday, they laid out very clear expectations for both state, federal, and local law officials and said that all non-emergency phone use should be stopped.
If the ban is turned into law by Congress, it will be up to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to enforce the new regulations.
The recommendation, unanimously agreed to by the five-member board, significantly exceeds any existing state laws restricting texting and cell phone use behind the wheel.
While the NTSB doesn’t have the power to impose restrictions, it’s recommendations carry significant weight with federal regulators and congressional and state lawmakers.
The board has previously recommended bans on texting and cell phone use by commercial truck and bus drivers and beginning drivers, but it has stopped short of calling for a ban on the use of the devices by adults behind the wheel of passenger cars.
While safety administrators may see this ban a as a sure-fire way to stop vehicular accidents, cell phone advocates think that the ban should be limited to manual texting.
‘Manual texting while driving is clearly incompatible with safety, which is why we have historically supported a ban on texting while driving,’ said Steve Largent, the president of wireless communications advocacy group CITA-The Wireless Association.
The group thinks that the current state-by-state approach should be maintained as opposed to a country-wide ban on phone usage by drivers, arguing that it should be up to ‘ local lawmakers and their constituents as to what they believe are the most appropriate laws where they live’.
Young deaths: (L-R) Both Daniel Schatz, 19, who was the driver of the pick up that caused the Missouri crash, and Jessica Brinker, 15, who was in one of the school buses, died in the accident near Gray Summitt
Massive: In addition to the two fatalities there were 38 injuries in the Missouri crash that involved a pickup, a tractor trailer, and two school buses
Damage: Two teenagers died and 38 others were injured in the massive Missouri car accident that prompted officials to re-examine the use of cell phones by drivers
‘We have always encouraged the industry to continue to develop new technology-based tools and offerings that are affordable and consumer-friendly that would create safer driving,’ Mr Largent continued in a posting on the group’s blog.
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The problem of texting while driving is getting worse despite a rush by states to ban the practice, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last week.
The idea of limiting the use of cell phones by drivers in order to increase driving safety is not a new one: there are already 35 states that have some form of distraction-preventing legislation, with Pennsylvania being the most recent addition after forbidding texting in November.
Of those 35 states that have previously taken legal measures to curb bad behavior, 12 of them just added the laws last year.
If the NTSB’s recommendation goes into effect, however, it will not just be a matter of rounding that number up to the full 50.
In remembrance: The Sullivan High School football stadium filled last August to pay tribute to driver Daniel Schatz, who was at the heart of the fatal car accident in Missouri
OTHER WAYS TO CRACK DOWN
California
The death of 2-year-old Calli Murray and her mother Ling last December prompted the push for a law in California’s to consider texting while driving a form of driving under the influence.
If ‘Calli’s Law’ goes into effect, people who are guilty of ‘distracted driving’ would be punishable to a similar extent to those who drive while intoxicated by alcohol or drugs.
New York and Connecticut
Last year, two pilot programs were enacted in Syracuse, New York and Hartford, Connecticut that urged law enforcement to crack down on distracted drivers.
The results were encouraging: in Syracuse, driver’s handheld cell usage and texting dropped by one-third.
The numbers were even more impressive in Hartford, where there was a 57 per cent decrease in handheld cell usage and texting dropped by nearly three-quarters.
Not all of the states who currently have some form of law in effect force a full ban, so this new proposal would make the law extend further.
‘Distracted driving is an epidemic on America’s roadways,’ Mr LaHood said.
‘You see it every day — drivers swerving in their lanes, stopping at green lights, running red ones or narrowly missing a pedestrian because they have their eyes and minds on their phones instead of the road. Yet, people continue to assume that they can drive and text or talk at the same time,’ he continued.
About two out of 10 American drivers overall — and half of drivers between 21 and 24 — say they’ve thumbed messages or emailed from the driver’s seat, according to a survey of more than 6,000 drivers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
And what’s more, many drivers don’t think it’s dangerous when they do it — only when others do, the survey found.
‘Every single time you take your eyes off the road or talk on the phone while you’re driving, even for just a few seconds, you put yourself and others in danger,’ Mr LaHood added.
At any given moment last year on America’s streets and highways, nearly 1 in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a handheld electronic device, the safety administration said. And those activities spiked 50 per cent over the previous year.
Driver distraction wasn’t the only significant safety problem uncovered by NTSB’s investigation of the Missouri accident.
Taking action: Transportation secretary Ray LaHood has spoken strongly against texting while driving
Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment at the time of the accident. He had an average of about five and a half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.
Regardless of the personal contributions to the accident, the fatal Missouri crash is a ‘big red flag for all drivers,’ NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said at a meeting to determine the cause of the accident and make safety recommendations.
It is not possible to know from cell phone records if the driver was typing, reaching for the phone or reading a text at the time of the crash, but it’s clear he was manually, cognitively and visually distracted, she said.
‘Driving was not his only priority,’ Ms Hersman said. ‘No call, no text, no update is worth a human life.’
Missouri had a law banning drivers under 21 years old from texting while driving at the time of the crash, but wasn’t aggressively enforcing the ban, board member Robert Sumwalt said.
‘Without the enforcement, the laws don’t mean a whole lot,’ he said.
THE CRASH THAT PROMPTED THE BAN: MISSOURI MULTI-CAR PILE UP
Two people- Daniel Schatz and Jessica Brinker- were killed in the chain-reaction freeway accident that is at the heart of the ban recommended today.
Daniel Schatz, 19
The crash involved a tractor trailer cab, two school buses and a pickup truck. The two victims were a girl on one of the buses and the driver of the pickup.
The buses were taking the high school band members from St. James to a Six Flags amusement park when the collision on Interstate 44 west of St. Louis occurred.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol says the pickup truck slammed into the back of the tractor, which had slowed for traffic near a construction zone near Gray Summit west of St. Louis.
The bus carrying the girl then struck the pickup from behind and was rear-ended by the other bus.
The final head count placed 38 people in hospital with injuries, though they were not life-threatening.
Though the amount that Daniel was on the phone was not fully realized until months after the incident, there were contributing factors to the crash. He was thought to be very fatigued at the time: he had an average of about five and a half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.
Jessica Brinker, 15
The pickup driver had no history of accidents or traffic violations, investigators said.
Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both school buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a hospital after the accident to pick up students crashed in the hospital parking lot when that bus’ brakes failed.
However, the brake problems didn’t cause or contribute to the severity of the accident, investigators said.
Another issue involved the difficulty passengers had exiting the first school bus after the accident.
The bus’ front and rear bus doors were unusable after the accident — the front door because the front bus was on top of the tractor truck cab and too high off the ground, and the rear door because the front of the bus had intruded five feet into the rear of the first bus.
Passengers had to exit through an emergency window, but the raised latch on the window kept catching on clothing as students tried to escape, investigators said. Exiting was further slowed because the window design required one person to hold the window up in order for a second person to crawl through, they said.
It was critical for passengers to exit as quickly as possible because a large amount of fuel puddled underneath the bus was a serious fire hazard, investigators said.
‘It could have been a much worse situation if there was a fire,’ Donald Karol, the NTSB’s highway safety director, said.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2073722/U-S-traffic-safety-officials-push-ban-ALL-phone-usage-drivers-teen-driver-caused-fatal-crash-flurry-11-texts-11-minutes-causing-pileup.html#ixzz1gTVddLKd
