Portland Personal Injury Law Blog

There has been a strong movement on state and federal levels to legislate against using cell phones while driving. It really came into focus late last year when the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) issued a recommendation that state governments ban all use of cell phones behind the wheel.

One of the byproducts of this movement is companies trying to find ways to market to people who are conscious of the distractions, but still want to find a way to communicate while driving. For instance, Picitup developed the smartphone app iOnRoad which offers collision warnings and alerts the driver if they are drifting out of their lane.

Technology continues its march forward, getting smarter and less reliant on our physical interaction. One example is Apple’s new app Siri, which acts as a personal assistant. All you have to do is talk and it will answer questions, make phone calls and text people.

Unfortunately, like any technology (at least in 2012) Siri is not perfect. In fact, some may say it’s flawed. Oregonian writer Joseph Rose recently tested Siri on our typically wet Portland roads, trying to text hands-free while driving. He ran into some difficulties in getting a simple text message sent, trying repeatedly to get the task done. According to Rose, it took him five tries to get a text sent. Not exactly ideal (or safe) when in traffic.

Even if Siri works perfectly for you, there is plenty of evidence showing that hands-free communications is dangerous as well. The problem doesn’t just lie in physically handling a phone while driving, it’s also the conversation itself that is a distraction.

“As long as one activity involves uncertainty about what might be happening next, then you need some spare capacity to have the mental radar to be able to detect those signals and to be able to execute the responses you need in order to deal with them,” said Ray Klein, a Canadian psychology professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Oregon has had distracted driving legislation on the books for a couple years now, but there was an exception given to people needing it for their job. That’s no longer the case, at least for people who exploited it as a loophole.

Starting this month, all Oregon drivers have to put their cell phones down when behind the wheel. If you are stopped by police for using your phone, work is no longer a viable excuse. While the exception may have been put into the law to protect law enforcement and medical professionals who use phones in emergency situations and are required as part of their job, it turned into a loophole that many others ended up exploiting. The new law will still allows emergency responders and roadside assistance workers to use hand-held cellphones. All drivers can still use hands-free devices.

Federal Crack Down Hits Commercial Drivers

The federal government has used its authority over interstate commerce to place a ban on handheld cellphone use by all commercial drivers, including truck and bus drivers. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the new law will affect about four million commercial drivers.

While these are welcomed changes in the law, it’s not a magic wand that will erase all distracted driving. Citizens need to understand the dangers and change their habits.

“How many more lives will be lost before we, as a society, change our attitudes about the deadliness of distractions?” asks National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Debbie Hersman.

According to the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2010, more than 3,000 people died in crashes that were attributed to distracted driving.

Once you stop scratching your head over the headline, read on for a perplexing proposal from Picitup, creators of the smartphone app iOnRoad.

Picitup CEO Alon Atsmon readily admits that not only are 20 percent of traffic crashes caused by distracted driving, but it’s one of the few accident causes on the rise. The main reason for this is the use of smartphones while driving.

So what does Atsmon propose? Use your smartphone, logically.

“We offer a smarter way to solve the problem – not by recommendations and bans but through the smartphone,” says Atsmon.

The iOnRoad app offers collision warnings, and an alert if you drift out of your lane. There’s also an option to have your phone read text messages aloud and automatically start the speakerphone feature when you get a call.

In order to have the app work, you mount your phone on your dash or windshield like a GPS so it can use the phone’s camera to monitor your lanes and distance from other vehicles.

“Let’s take this number one problem and turn it into the number one solution,” says Atsmon. “Our approach is to turn the smartphone into a collision warning system.”

Since you don’t have to look at your phone to get the warnings, this aspect of the app seems like it can be useful, though it also seems like if you understand traffic safety and aren’t falling asleep at the wheel you shouldn’t need a warning that you are drifting out of your lane or are too close to another vehicle.

The help with texting and an automated speaker phone is not as safe, since research shows that even hands-free phone use is a serious distraction risk.

The fight over the dangers of using smart phones while behind the wheel has reached a fever pitch, as it starts to garner nationwide press coverage. While there may be some civil libertarians voicing their concerns about how far reaching potential legislation may be, it’s the anti-distracted driving side that is making the most noise, especially now that the National Transportation Safety Board has put its full weight behind the movement.

While the NTSB has no legislative power, it does hold the power of persuasion, making it difficult for legislators to ignore. On the heels of recent senseless and tragic deadly distracted driving car crashes, federal safety investigators are urging action now.

“States aren’t ready to support a total ban yet, but this may start the discussion,” said Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association.

However, according to the Associated Press, a group that represents state highway safety offices referred to as a the recommendation “game-changer.”

One of the more striking examples of distracted driving happened last year, when a 19-year-old truck driver was found to have texted 11 times in 11 minutes before causing a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Missouri. Two people died and 38 were injured.

Recent high-profile cases show that these problems extend to commercial drivers as well. For instance, an investigation is underway regarding a train crash that happened when the engineer was texting. The accident killed 25 people in Chatsworth, California.

Here is a brief breakdown of the current state laws regarding distracted driving:

• There are 35 states, plus the District of Columbia, that ban texting while driving.
• Nine states and Washington D.C. bar hand-held cellphone use.
• Thirty states ban all cellphone use for “beginning drivers.”
• No states ban the use of hands-free devices for all drivers.