Proposals aimed at cracking down on texting while driving have run into roadblocks in the Florida House of Representatives in recent years.
But Speaker Richard Corcoran has given motorist-safety legislation the green light, and a bill to make texting while driving a “primary offense” has already zoomed through one key subcommittee during the opening week of the Legislature’s annual session.
This common-sense bill is long overdue. Florida remains an outlier in the United States: 43 other states allow law enforcement officers to stop and cite drivers observed texting while operating their vehicles.
It took until 2013 for Florida to finally pass a law that prohibited texting while driving, but it came with a sturdy string attached: Law enforcement officers could not issue citations unless the offending drivers committed some other infraction. Thus, the law made texting while driving a “secondary offense.”
House Bill 33 would make texting while driving a “primary offense,” meaning that officers could stop and cite a driver for that reason alone.
The primary-offense standard applies to failure to use seat belts, which makes sense. Yet, although wearing a seat belt improves one’s chances of surviving a crash, it is largely a personal safety issue. Texting while driving, though, creates hazardous distractions that threaten the safety of everyone else on the road.
For various reasons, including the personal-privacy rights of drivers, collecting solid data on the extent of driving while texting has been difficult. Highway-safety advocates credibly argue that crashes caused by distracted driving are substantially under-reported.
But credible studies — as well as common sense — find a strong link between texting while driving and motor-vehicle crashes. A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study found that texting increased a motorist’s risk of a crash by 23 times. A Texas A&M University study found a 7 percent decrease in car-crash hospitalizations where texting while driving is a primary offense.
Traffic-crash numbers in Florida also support additional safety measures. In 2013, there were 317,352 crashes in the state, injuring 211,144 people and killing 2,224. In 2017, crashes increased to 387,120 — with 245,834 injuries and 2,684 fatalities.
A new law is overdue.
There is cause for caution, however, and it has been voiced in the House by state Rep. Wengay Newton, a Democrat based in St. Petersburg whose district includes parts of Manatee and Sarasota counties with substantial minority populations.
The concern of Newton and others is that African-Americans and other racial minorities will be singled out for enforcement as a pretense for traffic stops. Investigations by the American Civil Liberties Union found that black drivers were cited for seat-belt infractions at a far higher rate than white drivers — even though seat-belt usage rates were similar.
For that reason, law enforcement agencies should be required to report the race of drivers cited for texting (as is the case with seat-belt violations) and that data should be monitored closely.
So, while the concern is well placed, it is nevertheless important to make texting while driving a primary offense for the safety of all motorists and passengers, regardless of their race.