In the past few days I have seen two news reports that individually and together demonstrate our law enforcement system getting tougher with teens who text while driving. The first story involved a 20 year old in Wisconsin who left work to drive home around midnight, sent six text messages while driving, and while composing the seventh text hit a bicyclist from behind. He died a week later. The driver was recently convicted of negligent homicide. The second story is that the State of New York has revised its penalty for texting by teen drivers from monetary fines to a 60 day license suspension. The change makes the penalty for texting the same as for reckless driving and speeding.
I am constrained to say that the verdict in Wisconsin was probably fitting – a criminal conviction for a driver who elevated texting above human life. I must also applaud New York for its change. When I served on the task force that overhauled Connecticut’s teen driver law, one thing that became apparent early in our work was that monetary fines for violations of teen driver laws were not much of a deterrent, especially in a state that has among highest per capita income in the country. We heard too many instances of teens — or their parents — paying the fine and the teen getting back behind the wheel, no wiser and not deterred in any way. On the other hand, a license suspension hits both teens and supervising adults hard. In fact, suspensions drive parents crazy; they quickly become accustomed to the convenience of having another driver in the house, and when that driver is lost to them for 30 or 60 days, they are dreadfully inconvenienced, and the boiling point arrives quickly. In other words, license suspensions are a far more effective deterrent.
Let’s remember, though, that whether state law characterizes texting while driving, by teens or adults, as a civil offense, moving violation, or criminal offense, and whether the state imposes fines or suspends the license, only affects what happens after a violation or a crash. We also need to focus on the upfront actions that prevent texting. As I have now said many times on this blog, Step 1 is to simplify our electronic driving laws, so everyone knows what is and it now allowed. Step 2 is parents of teen drivers — as hard as it may be — having a zero tolerance policy for teen drivers using any kind of distracting electronics (which means electronics that don’t make the car go forward or backward). Readers of this space also know the I am not a fan of “apps” installed on a phone to deter or block texting or phone calls. My philosophy is that rather than install a second piece of technology to disable texting or calling, we should focus on zero tolerance for phones being in the car and within reach during vehicle operation at all. Put another way, instead of putting the bomb in the car and giving teens a piece of technology to defuse the bomb, let’s not put the bomb in the car in the first place.
