Statewide Crackdown on Driving While Texting, Talking on Phone Begins

Admit it. Sometimes you make a phone call without your hands-free device while driving. OK, and sometimes you might furtively send a text or two.

April might be a good month to change those bad habits. A statewide police crackdown is a-comin'.

The California Highway Patrol and state Sen. Joe Simitian kicked off the state's first Distracted Driving Awareness Month at 10 a.m. Monday in Sacramento.

Hundreds of local police departments will join the California Highway Patrol to crack down on texting and other distracting phone and smartphone use.

Texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk, Los Altos police officer Eric Brooks told a crowd that had gathered for a bike expo held by GreenTown Los Altos last week.  

The National Highway Safety Administration concluded that cellphone users are more dangerous while driving than a drunken driver. A 2009 NHTSA study showed that 16 percent of fatal crashes involved distracted driving and 20 percent of injury crashes involved distracted driving. The age group with the greatest proportion of distracted drivers was the under-20 age group—16 percent of all drivers younger than 20 involved in fatal crashes were reported to have been distracted while driving.

Christopher J. Murphy, state office of traffic safety director, said, “Convincing California drivers to wear seat belts 20 years ago wasn’t easy either, but in 2010, more than 96 percent buckled up, and thousands of lives were saved.” 

While California Senate Bill 1613 has required drivers to use a hands-free headset since 2008, police said that conversations using the devices can still result in dangerous “inattention blindness.”

Safety Tips from the California Office of Traffic Safety

• Turn off your phone or put it out of reach before starting the car.

• Alert callers that you are unable to take calls when driving by changing your voicemail message.

• Make it a point not to call or text anyone who may be driving, such as during the commute to and from work or school, especially parents calling teen drivers.

• If you do need to make an important call or respond to a text message, pull over to a safe place to do so.

• If going cold turkey is too much of a stretch and you just can’t turn off your phone, consider using one of the available mobile phone apps that holds calls and incoming texts.