Should Texas require hands-free cell phone use while driving? Time to tell your lawmakers

Have you noticed how many drivers around you are buried in cell phone use? Now imagine if they were all intoxicated. How safe would you feel?

It’s not a stretch. Motorists on cell phones can mimic drunks with their weaving, unusual and varying speeds, and slow reaction times. The distracted can even be worse than the inebriated: Editors at Car and Driver magazine once tested reaction times and found that they actually braked more quickly while having consumed the legal limit of alcohol than while they were texting.

Worse yet, in a test of over-the-road truckers, a 2009 study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found the risk of collisions went up 23 times when the drivers were texting as opposed to not.

That’s one of many reasons Texas followed many other states in outlawing texting and driving in 2017. And while we will never know the extent of any correlation, road fatalities dropped 4 percent in Texas to 3,567 last year.

But you can still see it happening much too much. And while Texas troopers wrote just over 2,000 citations for texting and driving from the law’s inception through mid-January 2019, a texting ban is decidedly difficult for police to enforce because they have to catch you in the act from a distance.

Cell phone use while driving has gotten out of hand. And it’s dangerous: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says over 3,000 Americans are killed each year by distracted driving, with texting being a major and disturbing piece of that due to its seductiveness.

“Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for five seconds,” the NHTSA warns. “At 55 mph, that’s like driving the length of an entire football field with your eyes closed.”

What, if anything, we do about it is the question.

Some 16 states have passed hands-free laws prohibiting even holding phones while driving. Should Texas be the next — if it can beat South Carolina to the finish line, that is?

As much as anyone in the world, Texans hold fast to their freedom, and will likely do so with their phones. But other very conservative states are going hands-free. Texas needs to at least have this discussion — and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini has assured it, with her proposed Senate Bill 43 to allow only hands-free phone use behind the wheel.

With more and more cars equipped to help, more and more drivers will be going hands-free voluntarily, and should. But for many, the technology is either unavailable or unapproachable. Lawmakers will have to grapple with whether to force their compliance with a hands-free law.

In a wholly unscientific survey of some Georgia residents on social media, most told us the hands-free law there changed their and their loved ones’ behavior. A law enforcement officer even told us his previously cell-happy driving daughter requested he buy her hands-free technology in order to avoid a ticket.

One Georgian, though, said of hands-free: “More dangerous than ever. Taking my eyes off the road to focus on the radio to figure out which buttons to push, when before it was simple as opening the phone.”

There are many factors to weigh, and conflicting interests to balance.

But it’s time we decide one way or another. Tell your lawmakers what you think. The status quo isn’t working.