A bipartisan bill would add legal penalties for distracted driving, punishing motorists who pay more attention to their phone than the road ahead.
If the bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would follow most of its neighbors and join almost two dozen states in prohibiting cell phone use that isn’t hands-free.
However, laws elsewhere haven’t necessarily reduced distracted driving. To make roads safer, strong enforcement and changing driver behavior may be crucial.
“Distracted driving … is a very, very real public safety concern,” Sen. Rosemary Brown, R-Scotrun, said during a Tuesday press conference. “Cell phones are a consistent, addictive distraction and distract for an extended period of time, leading to crashes and preventable deaths of innocent drivers.”
Brown’s proposed bill would prohibit handheld cell phone use and create a $100 fine if a driver is caught using their phone. Motorists could still use GPS, but the phone cannot be held or supported by a person’s body.
Nationally, more than 3,100 people died in 2019 due to distracted driving crashes. Pennsylvania recorded almost 11,000 distracted driving crashes in 2020, with 47 deaths and almost 300 serious injuries. Officials warn that those numbers undercount crashes and injuries, as many drivers do not admit to being distracted.
“These tragic deaths were preventable,” Brown said. “Responsible cell phone use driving is a behavioral adjustment that must occur to prevent more senseless tragedies, and we must set this expectation through law to protect the innocent the best that we can.”
“We’re working to change behavior, build responsible driving, and of course public safety,” Brown added.
Brown was joined by Eileen Miller, whose son Paul was killed by a distracted driver in a head-on collision.
“My life was changed by one second,” Miller said. “It took one second for a semi-truck driver to take his eyes off the road to kill our beautiful, young, handsome son. For nothing because of a cell phone. And our life was forever changed. There’s no reason why any text, cell phone call, Snapchat, anything is worth a life.”
Miller had to identify Paul by his clothing.
“I couldn’t even recognize my son’s body, he was so badly injured,” she said. “Hands-free is not risk-free. Turn the phones off or silence them.”
Cell phones aren’t the only distractions to drivers, but they represent a significant temptation for many drivers, making the road more dangerous.
“If you’re texting and you spend 4.5 seconds texting, which is probably about common, and you’re going 55 mph, you will have gone 100 yards blindfolded,” said Jonathan Greer, president of the Insurance Federal of Pennsylvania. “That’s the reality.”
If Pennsylvania prohibits hand-held cell phone use, it will become the 25th state to do so, along with the District of Columbia, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But the law doesn’t automatically make people safer.
“It's not clear that banning hand-held phone use and texting reduces crashes,” IIHS noted. “Drivers are distracted by things other than cell phones, so prohibiting phone use will not eliminate distracted driving. Broader countermeasures that keep drivers from becoming distracted or that mitigate the consequences of distracted driving, such as crash avoidance technology, may be more effective than cellphone bans.”
Drivers who use their cell phones also tend to be riskier drivers in other ways, IIHS noted, and changing their behavior matters.
Some studies have shown that visibly enforcing the law can at least lower cell phone use.
“After programs of publicized, high-intensity enforcement of hand-held cellphone and texting bans were implemented, the number of drivers observed holding a phone to their ear declined,” IIHS noted.
Enforcement waves in Delaware led to a reduction in cell phone use, but phone bans haven’t always reduced crashes.
“While enacting a state law banning high-risk driver text messaging may be reasonable public policy, research results show that this blunt regulatory approach, along with bans on handheld cell phones, has no discernible impact on reducing automotive accidents,” Thomas Hemphill of the University of Michigan-Flint argued in the academic journal Regulation.
A longer campaign of educating the public and changing attitudes may be required, similar to past safety strategies.
“Efforts to reduce distraction-related crashes will require an education component to be successful—a shift in the “social norm” is needed,” Howard Hall, chief of police in Roanoke County, Virginia, argued in Police Chief magazine. “Alcohol-related traffic crashes have declined steadily over the past few decades largely due to education campaigns advising motorists that driving under the influence is socially unacceptable and that they can be arrested for driving while impaired. The same shift in attitude is required to address the distracted driving epidemic.”
