Train wreck puts focus on texting restrictions

associated press

One day last summer, Jim Messer, a Florida attorney, was nearly run off the road by another car. When he recovered, he says, he was able to see the other driver texting on her cell phone, balancing it on the wheel.

“There’s gotta be a law against this,” Messer thought. But there wasn’t — not in his state, anyway. He’s been working since then to get one passed.

Despite a general belief on the part of researchers and authorities that texting at the wheel, like other driver distractions, could be jeopardizing lives, only five states and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from doing it.

Now investigators are looking into whether texting may have played a role in the disastrous California train crash that killed 25. Two teenage train buffs told a TV station that the engineer, who was killed, sent them a text message a minute before the crash. A phone was not found.

For now, there is no data directly tying text messaging to traffic accidents. Though fully 74 percent of Americans age 18-29 use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center, it’s a phenomenon that’s only a few years old.

But a 2006 government study found that distracted drivers of all sorts were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-crashes. And everyone knows that checking e-mails or sending a text message, just like talking on a cell phone or playing with the radio, can distract a driver. A researcher who worked on the 2006 study, Charlie Klauer of the Virginia Tech Traffic Institute, says the crash risk was doubled when a driver looked away from the road for two seconds out of six.

“Texting is potentially even more risky than speaking on a cell phone, because you’re not only taking your mind off the road — you’re taking your eyes off the road,” argues Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

But it’s very hard to prove, in the aftermath of a crash, that texting or e-mailing was the cause. Police in upstate New York found a series of messages sent and received from 17-year-old Bailey Goodman’s phone just before her sport-utility vehicle slammed into a tractor-trailer one night in June last year, killing her and four friends who’d all just graduated from high school. But they couldn’t tell if she was the one using her phone.