New tools join the fight against distracted driving

Editor's note: This story was produced by student reporters as part of the High School Journalism Institute, an annual collaboration between The Oregonian/OregonLive and Oregon State University. Read this post for more information about the training program.

Andie Portie recalls the time her friend crashed a car into a fire hydrant.

The friend dropped a phone under the car seat and looked down to pick it up. The car swerved and went off the road, hitting the hydrant. The friend and a passenger were OK, she said, but the car was wrecked.

That's why Portie, a 21-year-old Oregon State University student, doesn't text while driving.

"It's never that important," she said.

Texting while driving, along with other distractions, is increasingly to blame for serious crashes, authorities say. So as transportation officials in Oregon and elsewhere once developed new education campaigns and enforcement techniques to combat drunken driving, they're now looking for tactics that will persuade drivers to stay off their phones -- or at least make it easier to catch drivers in the act.

In Oregon, an average of five people were injured each week in a distracted driving crash involving a cellphone between 2010 and 2014, the state transportation department said. In the same period, more than 1,500 people were convicted on average each month of using a cellphone while driving.

"Human beings like to think we're good at multitasking," said Marie Dodds, a spokeswoman for AAA Oregon/Idaho. "But the reality is that we're not."

Texting while driving is often thought of as a youth problem, and education campaigns frequently focus on teenagers. Indeed, a recent AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety study found that 12 percent of crashes involving teen drivers occurred while they were using their cellphone.

But Kelly Kapri, who manages the Oregon Department of Transportation's Safe and Courteous Driving program, said crash and conviction data suggest teens are actually less likely to text and drive than other age groups.

That's why some states have turned their attention to other demographics, including children not even old enough to drive.

In Connecticut, state transportation officials and Boston public broadcaster WGBH launched an online game meant to encourage kids to pressure their parents to stop texting and driving.

A federal agency, meanwhile, took to shaming texting drivers on social media. When a driver tweeted she was bored while driving, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration publicly replied, "We'd rather you be bored than in a wreck."

Authorities have also found laws on texting and driving are difficult to enforce.

Oregon State Police Senior Trooper Scott Granger and other officers on patrol usually look for drivers holding their hand up to their head, or for a bright glow on the driver's face from a cellphone screen.

"I could probably find someone texting and driving within five minutes of being on patrol," said Granger. Phones, he said, "are like an appendage of the body for some people."

But people tend to put their phone down the second they see a marked police car, making it hard for officers to see the violation.

That's why state police have added 40 unmarked cars to their fleet. In cars without markings and visible lights, Granger said, police see how drivers behave when they don't know they're being watched.

Kapri said she's interested in a New York proposal to use a new device transportation officials are calling "textalyzers." As police use breathalyzers to test blood alcohol content in the field, they could use a textalyzer to test whether drivers were texting or calling on a cellphone without accessing the content of the messages.

Lawmakers in New York are considering laws that would allow police to use the devices, The New York Times reported, and which would allow police officers to suspend the licenses of drivers who refuse the use of the textalyzer. Similarly, using the technology in Oregon would require a change in state law, Kapri said.

States across the country are each taking different approaches to addressing texting and driving to see what works, Kapri said.

"As a nation, we're all struggling," she said.

-- Isabel Angeles Lim, Parkrose High School
-- Sarah Milshtein, Westview High School

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