INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana lawmakers are looking to strengthen current distracted driving laws, with a bill passed by the Roads and Transportation Committee last week, and all signs point to it passing and becoming law.
Texting while driving is already against the law in Indiana, but this newest bill would eliminate some loopholes by banning all handheld phone use while driving. Currently, law enforcement officers are required to prove a person was in fact texting while driving in order to write a ticket. Going forward, only hands-free phone use and emergency calls would be allowed if this bill becomes law.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, sending a text message takes about 5 seconds on average. That means a driver going 55 miles per hour would be doing the equivalent of driving a football field with his or her eyes closed by texting while driving.
This, of course, can have deadly consequences. Numbers from the NHTSA from 2017 show that 9% of all deadly crashes involved distracted drivers. 3,166 people were killed in car crashes, and 599 people outside of cars were killed (including pedestrians and bikers).
Will new, stricter laws stop people from using their phones while driving? That’s hard to say. It’s a relatively new problem, and therefore there isn’t a ton of data on these laws yet. The data that does exist shows mixed results.
However, there is some evidence that full bans on handheld phone use (like is currently being considered) are more effective than specific bans on texting and driving (like Indiana has currently). A study led by the Nationwide Children’s Hospital, for example, found that teenagers in states with full bans reported 55% lower handheld phone use.
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