NORTHAMPTON — In the past five years, the number of Massachusetts residents busted for illegally using their phones while driving has skyrocketed.
After a texting-and-driving ban went into effect in 2010, distracted driving violations jumped from 1,893 in 2012 to 9,432 in 2016, according to figures from the state’s Merit Rating Board.
Yet despite that enforcement escalation, those violations accounted for less than 1.5 percent of all motor vehicle violations issued in 2016, and distracted driving is as grave a problem as ever. In 2015, a distracted driver was involved in 21 percent of the state’s 291 fatal crashes, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data.
These numbers come after 2015 saw the largest nationwide spike in fatal crashes in 50 years, which is leading some to wonder whether the state should stiffen its laws against distracted driving, as many states in the region have done.
“We’ve been hearing horror stories for quite some time now about actual accidents, and we’ve also gotten many calls and emails and letters about near misses,” Senate President Stan Rosenberg said. “We do need to get the House, the governor and the Senate on the same page to do something reasonable about this.”
Rosenberg, an Amherst Democrat whose district includes six communities in Hampshire County, said last year he was in favor of a Senate bill that would have prohibited in-vehicle use of devices without hands-free technology. As the nation becomes increasingly concerned with the dangers consumer technologies create for drivers, similar statutes have passed in the neighboring states of Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.
That bill passed the Senate in Massachusetts, but never made it through the House. State Sen. Cynthia Creem, D-Newton, has introduced a similar bill this year, and though Rosenberg said he would have to read it before making any concrete statement on the legislation, he supports the idea in principle.
Sen. Eric P. Lesser, D-Longmeadow, also said he approves of hands-free bills in general, and that he supported last year’s legislation. Lesser is on the Transportation Committee, where Creem’s new bill currently sits.
“We need some law changes where appropriate, but we also need to change the culture around what is considered safe, what is considered appropriate,” Lesser said.
From the little research that has been done on those kinds of bans, they appear to work.
A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health that looked at federal crash data from 2000 to 2010 found that primary texting bans — laws that allow police to stop a driver for a texting violation alone — were significantly associated with a 3 percent decrease in overall crash fatalities for all ages.
Texas A&M University assistant professor Alva Ferdinand was the primary researcher on that study, and said that despite a popular presumption that technology is only distracting young people, older people are affected too. For those aged 22 to 64, it was laws prohibiting handheld devices altogether that resulted in a significant decrease in fatalities, according to her study.
“In light of that, I think handheld bans should also be a tool that states consider to combat distracted driving and all the negative consequences of that activity,” Ferdinand told the Gazette on Wednesday.
Ferdinand and her co-authors also published a study in 2015 looking at the impact of distracted-driving laws on crash-related hospitalizations from 2003 to 2010. They found that in states with primary texting-and-driving bans, hospitalizations were on average reduced 7 percent, and up to 9 percent among those older than 22. The study also found that handheld bans led to a decrease in crash-related hospitalizations.
“There’s merit in states legislating in this area, and so far we’ve found that the handheld bans and primary texting bans are effective in reducing some of the bad roadway outcomes that as public health officials and policymakers we’re trying to address,” Ferdinand said.
Those bad outcomes may be far worse than some federal data suggest.
“What little data we do have, we know it’s an issue, and we know it could only be a representation of half of what’s going on,” said Maureen Vogel, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Safety Council.
Distraction-related crashes are notoriously difficult to track for a number of reasons, Vogel said, leading to underreporting.
Statistics from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System are an important source for influencing national legislative and funding priorities, but those numbers come from police crash reports, which Vogel said offer an incomplete picture of the magnitude of the problem.
Sometimes there is no field on those reports where officers can mark that a crash involved a distracted driver, Vogel said. Police also often have to rely on drivers admitting they were using a cellphone.
“There’s not a breathalyzer for distraction. You are relying on people’s goodwill and honesty to tell you what actually was going on,” Vogel said. “There are not a lot of people who want to self-report dangerous behavior.”
In other cases, she said, drivers or witnesses have died in the wreck.
What’s more, if there is some other violation of the law involved in an incident, police may not investigate cellphone use. And if they do, cellphone records can be difficult to acquire, and must line up exactly with the time of the crash.
“If someone gets in a crash, unless it’s a very serious crash and we subpoena the phone and get the phone records that way, very few people are going to come forward and say, ‘Yes, I was on my phone,’” Bruce Nyquist, Vermont’s highway safety director, told the Gazette.
A more accurate picture may be found with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which conducts nationwide observational surveys of distracted drivers. Although the percentage of drivers holding cellphones to their ears has declined over the years, the latest numbers from 2015 tell a troubling story: that visible manipulation of handheld devices — considered by many experts the most dangerous way technology distracts drivers — has been steadily trending upward in recent years.
Vermont’s ban on handheld cellphone use went into effect in October 2014, and was subsequently updated to include drivers sitting at traffic lights or stop signs.
Nyquist said police chiefs around the state were telling him initially that it seemed to be working. But having a strict law on the books doesn’t alone fix what has become an entrenched behavior, he said.
“It seems to have worn off over time,” Nyquist said of the law’s effectiveness. “Currently it’s pretty rampant out there again, and so we need to take strides and steps to crack down and let people know that it’s an issue.”
For police forces across the country, those strides and steps often include what’s called “high-visibility enforcement” — targeted, vigorous police mobilizations meant to deter the public from engaging in a risky behavior.
It’s a strategy that Vogel, of the National Safety Council, said has proven effective in changing driver behavior when coupled with strong educational campaigns and comprehensive laws.
“We have seen over time that education, legislation and enforcement work,” Vogel said.
As one example, she pointed to significantly higher seat belt use nowadays compared with previous decades. National awareness campaigns and tough enforcement of seat belt laws helped change behavior across the country, she said.
As part of the policing aspect of that equation, departments in places like Texas and Tennessee have used buses and other big rigs to spot drivers using their devices from a higher vantage point. In Massachusetts, police departments, including many in Hampshire County, have been receiving federal grants to conduct high-visibility enforcement for distracted driving, seat belt use and other motor vehicle violations.
What high-visibility enforcement has meant in Vermont is placing undercover officers at a construction site dressed up as flaggers, or on the second floor of a nearby building, picking out distracted drivers for other police to pull over and ticket, Nyquist said.
In Connecticut, transportation officials have not only practiced high-visibility enforcement, but have also measured its effect using observational studies, which are a more accurate metric than crash reports for gauging the extent of distracted driving.
In those studies, trained observers go out before and after high-visibility mobilizations and document the behavior they see. The last time Connecticut did those studies was two years ago, after enforcement campaigns at more than 30 sites across seven municipalities, according to Aaron Swanson, the state’s distracted driving program coordinator. He said officials observed a 9 percent decrease in distracted driving in those areas after targeted enforcement.
“What we think so far is that strong enforcement of our handheld mobile phone law can have an effect on drivers where they know it’s happening,” Swanson said.
But those tactics, according to Swanson, were successful in large part because Connecticut has an absolute ban on using handheld devices in the car. He said the state’s next step will be to begin observing a variety of roads, not just sites where high-visibility enforcement took place.
“I think that having the law on the books and giving law enforcement the tools to participate in strong enforcement has the possibility to change driver behavior,” Swanson said. “You’ve got to give law enforcement the proper tools to do their job.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.