Why Grits still opposes a Texas texting ban

It's March of an odd-numbered year, so it must be time for a new round of demagoguery and overstatement about texting while driving and a renewed push to criminalize it.

First, a caveat: Grits acknowledges that texting while driving is unsafe and discourages the practice. But not every unsafe activity warrants a criminal law and, in this case, the arguments militate against it.

That's for a number of reasons. For starters, reckless driving is already a crime. If someone is texting and it results in bad driving, wouldn't that qualify? Why not enforce that law instead of creating a new one?

Moreover, what if a texting ban actually increased the number of distracted-driving accidents? An oft-ignored study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that states which enacted texting bans saw crashes increase. If they did acknowledge that study, texting-ban proponents would have to admit these uncomfortable facts:

It's perplexing for both police and lawmakers throughout the U.S.: They want to do something about the danger of texting while driving, a major road hazard, but banning the practice seems to make it even more dangerous. 

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down. 

It's hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver's eyes are looking down and away from the road.

The studies you see supporting a texting ban test whether drivers are better or worse at their appointed tasks while texting. But we can grant that texting is not ideal and still understand that the same distraction can be caused by looking at the map on their navigation system or digging around for the last french fry in a fast food bag. And we can also recognize that it'd be an even worse distraction if they were holding the phone out of view to avoid detection. What you don't want to do is make things worse.

That's the problem: There's a very real chance that do-gooders seeking a texting ban will cause more harm than they prevent. And their good intentions won't be a comfort to victims if death totals rise, as they did in 3 of 4 states where texting bans were enacted.

Anyway, many types of distractions cause people to take their eyes off the road, and Grits is unconvinced this problem is worse than people eating fast food while driving, putting on their makeup, or disciplining kids in the back seat.

There's also the fact that phones are used for a lot more than texting, including legitimate purposes like playing music or performing navigation functions. So the same activity - looking at your phone - could indicate legal or illegal activity. How can the law be enforced fairly?

Finally, Grits believes that, precisely because of this ambiguity, texting bans will be used by law enforcement for pretext stops - as an excuse to question people and look inside their car for other purposes, perhaps requesting consent to search or interrogating the driver about their activities.

San Antonio logged 12,000 tickets for texting while driving in the first year of their ban (at $200 each, so raising $2.4 million in Class C misdemeanor fines). This is happening at a time when the number of traffic tickets overall statewide has declined, so texting bans give local police an excuse to ramp up traffic stops at a time when the trend is in the other direction.

That's why Grits doesn't favor the texting ban legislation up in the Texas House Transportation Committee this week and hope it does not pass. It strikes me as an example where people's anger and innate judginess has overwhelmed their capacity for reason.

No, I don't approve of texting while driving. But I'm even less a fan of criminalizing common human behaviors so the government can make money and insert themselves into people's private affairs. And that goes double when doing so might worsen the harm it purports to prevent. In general, I want law enforcement to have fewer reasons  to get into average people's business, not more.

Texting ban proponent: If new laws don't improve safety, at least they make people 'feel weird'

Better late than never, the Dallas Morning News' Tom Benning offered up an assessment of research regarding the public safety benefits, or rather the lack of documentable safety benefits, from municipal ordinances banning texting and cell phone use, titled, "Do cities' texting-while-driving bans reduce crashes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" (July 17). In a nutshell:

Texting or talking on the phone while driving is demonstrably dangerous — a fact that’s backed up by reams of research. There’s no denying either that cellphone use while driving can cause accidents — Austin, even with flaws in the data, saw 70 of those wrecks in 2014 alone.

But banning the practice doesn’t necessarily reduce accidents.

A Dallas Morning News analysis of the imperfect crash data in 12 Texas cities with cellphone rules found no consistent reduction in distracted driving wrecks after cities enacted bans. And that follows equally mixed reviews found by scientific studies on statewide bans on texting or hand-held cellphone use while driving in other states.

“It’s not clear the bans in place have had the desired effect,” said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “There are a lot of issues related to enforcement, data and other things, but that’s the bottom line.”

Regular readers may recall past analyses of traffic accidents in states with texting bans. The story goes on provide this sumamry of the News' research, and others:

To see what impact these ordinances might be having, The News analyzed Texas Department of Transportation crash data for a dozen cities that have passed them. The data focused on wrecks in which cellphone use or distraction was a contributing factor.

But the statistics, which rely mainly on driver accounts from the scene of a crash, raised more questions than they answered.

Several cities saw the crash rate for cellphone-involved wrecks drop after implementing either a texting or a hands-free ordinance. But many of those same cities saw distracted driving crashes, which include the cellphone incidents, actually increase.

Did the ordinance actually reduce cellphone use? Or did it just make drivers even more leery to admit that they had been using their phone? Or did the elimination of one distraction behind the wheel simply lead to others?

Then some cities saw crash rates increase after implementing new rules. Some saw those rates go up and then go down. And some indeed saw an apparent drop in both crash categories.

But there are many variables at play.

In Corpus Christi, for instance, a police spokesman explained that his city’s precipitous drop in those crash rates was likely just the result of the fact that the department no longer fills out crash reports on wrecks that don’t cause at least serious injury.

Despite those challenges, some argue that such volatility adds to the need for a statewide ban on texting behind the wheel. That would reduce confusion drivers might face in knowing which cities have ordinances and which ones don’t.

Proving success, however, would still be a challenge.

Scientific studies on statewide bans have relied on insurance claims, hospital visits or crashes overall — and then tried to control for other factors that could affect the data. But that research ends up similarly mixed, with some showing success and others not.

The story concludes by quoting a supporter of texting bans saying that whether they're measurably improving safety doesn't matter. Instead, it's about changing the "culture."

supporters counter that the statistics are just part of the story.

They argue that the push against talking or texting behind the wheel is really about creating a culture change. And for that to take hold, they say, it means setting expectations state by state — and if need be, city by city.

“At some point in the future, it should feel weird and wrong to pick up a phone in the car,” said Beaman Floyd, director of the Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions.

Proponents sell these new criminal laws by insisting they'll save lives, and if the data showed an improvement, they'd surely claim credit. But when traffic safety promises fail to materialize, all of a sudden the goal was really a "culture change" - not to measurably improve safety but to make people "feel weird and wrong to pick up a phone in the car."

Making people "feel weird" is not a usual or appropriate function for criminal law if there's no correlated public safety benefit. If changing culture is the goal, enforcement money would be better spent on an advertising/PR budget.

Ban on Daydreaming would save more lives than texting-while-driving ban, just as enforceable

Eric Nicholson at the Dallas Observer's Unfair Park blog rehearsed the arguments against the ban on texting-while-driving passed in the Texas House, with a particularly good discussion of the disingenuous numbers used to hype the policy and the inevitable difficulties enforcing it:

When pushing the bill, proponents tend to conflate distracted driving with cell phone use, perhaps because the numbers are more impressive. Every year there 3,300 fatalities nationwide linked to distracted driving. In Texas, one in five crashes -- or maybe it's one in four -- involve driver distraction. Texting may well be the "king of distraction," as an insurance-industry lobbyist recently told the Texas legislature, but if so it's a monarch in a multipolar world. Data on whether and how a cell phone was being used in the lead-up to a car crash are shaky, since that generally requires a person to detail their phone use to a cop investigating the crash, but the best federal figures suggest that cell phone use of all kinds is involved in 12 percent of distracted driving crashes; daydreaming, meanwhile, accounted for 18 percent. And that's for all types of cell-phone use, not just texting but also reaching for the phone, dialing a number, and talking -- none of which are touched by the bill passed by the House.

Of course, the fact that no one knows exactly how big a piece of the distracted-driving pie texting accounts for isn't necessarily defensible grounds for opposing it. But conflating numbers in a way that overstates the potential impact of a policy on public safety is, at the least, frustrating. There's also no clear data on the effectiveness of texting bans. A 2014 study concluded that primary texting bans similar to the one being considered in Texas were associated with a 3-percent reduction in traffic fatalities. But another study concluded that whatever impact texting bans had on accidents dissipated after a couple of months, once the news coverage had died down. Still another study, put out by an insurance industry group, found that texting bans have sometimes increased crashes, possibly because drivers were more prone to put their phones on their laps instead of at eye level in order to avoid detection by police.

A bigger issue is the difficulty of enforcement. Under the bill, texting and surfing the web on a cell phone is banned, but dialing a phone number or using a phone to navigate via services like Google Maps is allowed. How can cops know whether someone is texting or looking at Google Maps? They can't: The bill naturally prohibits cops from searching phones during a traffic stop. And are misdemeanor prosecutors really going to subpoena cell phone records to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a driver was texting when he was pulled over? Doubtful.

In that case, the measure would stand as little more than pretext for police to pull over drivers they didn't otherwise suspect of a crime. State Representative Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat, proposed an amendment that would prevent texting from being used as probable cause for a traffic stop, but it failed, along with his proposal to require larger police departments to annually report texting-while-driving citations, including a racial breakdown.

If his concerns seem overblown, remember Dallas' now-dead law requiring bike helmets. It, like the texting ban, was touted as a commonsense way to promote public safety, but it led to wildly disparate enforcement: almost all of the citations happened in poor, minority neighborhoods.

It's telling that "daydreaming" is a 50 percent greater "distraction" to drivers than phone use, including texting and talking combined. If we want to keep everybody safe, surely we need to ban that next? Then, of course, we'll need Thought Police to enforce the Daydreaming Ban, and if anybody tells you it's a bad idea, just raise your voice and insist texting while driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk, and daydreaming is half again as dangerous as that! Think of the children!

Nicholson concluded, IMO rightly, that the only potentially valid, fact based argument for the texting ban is to "send a message," and regular readers know Grits thinks criminal laws are a terrible way to do that. After all, who besides lawyers read them? Want to send a message? Then taxpayers' money would be better spent on billboards and TV ads telling people to get off the phone than on cops and courts to "educate" them via Class C tickets.

Grits would also add an important coda to Nicholson's points which this blog raised in December, and which is perhaps even more poignant today in the wake of a bridge collapsing yesterday on I-35:

few politicians want to talk about the much more significant cause of fatal accidents in Texas: Underinvestment in transportation infrastructure, particularly in the oil patch where the Eagle Ford shale region has seen a 40 percent increase in fatal crashes, but really throughout the state. Those parsimonious budget decisions at the Legislature are contributing more to the traffic fatality total than drivers talking on cell phones. But it's not as much fun to hold a press conference demagoguing against oneself. So it's better from a pol's perspective to find some group to blame and criminalize, like cell-phone users, even if in the scheme of things that's not the most common cause of driving fatalities, by a long shot, and bans may even make the problem worse.

Texting while judging won't get you disbarred, but it might get you impeached.

State Rep. Harold Dutton this week filed a resolution to impeach state District Judge Elizabeth Coker from Polk County for allegedly texting advice and suggested lines of questioning to prosecutors in her court during trial. See coverage from Your Houston News. Hard to say what are the chances of it passing at this late hour, but it's also hard to imagine who would stand up at the Legislature to defend such behavior after they've spent half a year debating the Michael Morton Act, innocence commissions, etc.. We'll see.

RELATED: Texting while judging: Judge texted assistance to prosecutors during trial(s)

Encryption for cloud communications may best protect Fourth Amendment rights

Says readwrite mobile:

With government requests for personal data on the rise, there are few guarantees in place that you or I won't have our private communications snooped through. Since the Fourth Amendment hasn't yet caught up with the lightning fast pace of technological change, some of the best privacy protections are often the ones implemented by tech companies themselves.

Well put. The comment comes in response to a DEA complaint that encryption on the Apple iPhone's chat services made them indecipherable, even with a warrant. Continued writer John Paul Titlow:

By architecting iMessage the way it did, Apple created a messaging protocol more secure and private than standard text messages, which is how millions of people communicate every day. As we fire those texts back and forth, we're all creating a digital trail that can be snooped upon or hacked more easily than we care to think about. But if they're being and sent and received from iPhones running iOS 5 or later, those messages are invisible to wiretaps by law enforcement or other prying eyes.

Apple didn't have to build iMessage with end-to-end encryption. Gmail isn't encrypted this way, nor are the Facebook messages that are increasingly used like texts on mobile devices. Clearly, SMS text messages aren't particularly well-secured either. Whether winning privacy points was its motivation or not, Apple definitely racks up a few for this.

Legislation like Texas Rep. Jon Stickland's HB 3164 to require warrants to access electronic communications is one way to protect privacy for third-party facilitated communications, but a far more effective one would be if Gmail, Facebook, and other major providers encrypted user messages. Those companies may or may not have an economic incentive to do so, but they're arguably in a better position in many cases than legislatures or the courts to protect privacy and Fourth Amendment rights.

Committee to address reckless driving fines, police officer side businesses

What's the difference between a tax increase and an increased fine for a Class C misdemeanor? Not much to the person paying it, but apparently anti-tax Republicans can justify the latter, if never the former. Rep. Tom Craddick from Midland has a bill up in the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee meeting today raising the fine for reckless driving from $200 to $1,000.

Grits imagines Rep. Craddick is trying to address the problem of prosecutors and judges reducing charges for DWIs to avoid the excessive, counter-productive financial burden placed on defendants by the Driver Responsibility Surcharge. The better solution to that would be to pass Rep. Larry Gonzalez's bill eliminating the surcharge, which would negate the incentives for plea bargaining down DWI charges. That legislation has been referred to the same committee.

It's also possible Craddick filed the bill as a backstop in case his texting-while-driving legislation either fails to pass or is vetoed again. Reckless driving is currently the charge on the books that applies to such behavior. Grits can't say it too many times, though: Increased criminal penalties cannot or at least should not be the primary solution to every social problem, though that tends to be how many legislators approach things.

Another piece of legislation on the same agenda comes from Rep. Bill Calegari, who wants to forbid police officers from using their rank or status as an active peace officer to advertise or promote a private business. That's a good bill. I've always thought peace officers should be required to register their independent businesses with TCLEOSE. You'd be amazed how common the practice is that Rep. Callegari is trying to ban.

Texting ban pushed despite veto last session

Tomorrow, the Texas House Transportation Committee will consider several bills banning or limiting use of cell phones for talking or texting. Ironically, though you wouldn't know it from the MSM coverage, "Texting bans haven't reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in 3 of the 4 states we studied after bans were enacted," according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Shannon Edmonds at TDCAA said Friday that, of the four related bills on the agenda, "HB 63 is the one to watch; it will be amended in committee and probably voted out first." Governor Perry, regular readers know, vetoed similar legislation in 2011.

MORE: From the Austin Statesman, "A spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, just hours after a tear-laden House committee hearing on a proposed texting-while-driving ban, said Tuesday that Perry continues to see education rather than regulation as the solution for the increasingly widespread but dangerous practice."

Texas media won't say it, but Rick Perry's veto of texting while driving ban likely saved lives

A press conference at the Texas Legislature yesterday touted a bills banning texting while driving, even though Governor Rick Perry vetoed such legislation last session. The pitch-session received wide coverage:

• Texas Tribune
• Houston Chronicle
• Dallas News
• Austin Statesman
• San Angelo Standard Times
• Odessa American
• KUT-News

The tenor of all these stories may be summed up by state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, who said in a statement, "Banning texting while driving will undoubtedly save lives." There's only one problem: It's not true.

Remarkably, not one news outlet covering the story chose to mention that, "The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down." In a 2010 news release announcing the results of that study, the IIHS contended that:

"Texting bans haven't reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in 3 of the 4 states we studied after bans were enacted. It's an indication that texting bans might even increase the risk of texting for drivers who continue to do so despite the laws," says Adrian Lund, president of both [the Highway Loss Data Institute] and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Lund said of lawmakers proposing such bans, "They're focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it. This ignores the endless sources of distraction and relies on banning one source or another to solve the whole problem."

Why might texting bans increase accidents? IIHS suggested that drivers, particularly young people, may be "moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers' eyes further from the road and for a longer time." Indeed, "Using a driving simulator, researchers at the University of Glasgow found a sharp decrease in crash likelihood when participants switched from head-down to head-up displays. This suggests that it might be more hazardous for a driver to text from a device that's hidden from view on the lap or vehicle seat."

Bottom line: Texting bans have simply not had the desired effect. "Survey results indicate that many drivers, especially younger ones, shrug off these bans. Among 18-24 year-olds, the group most likely to text, 45 percent reported doing so anyway in states that bar all drivers from texting. This is just shy of the 48 percent of drivers who reported texting in states without bans."

I'm not surprised that legislators continue to push the ban despite such evidence. The go-to move for legislators whenever something occurs they don't like is to pass new criminal laws or seek to increase punishments, and if the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Grits does find it disappointing, though, that not one media outlet in the whole state offered up the caveat that such a law may do more harm than good.

Zaffirini said that if the governor vetoed this legislation again he'd have “blood on his hands” but it's entirely likely, if the Insurance Institute's analysis is accurate, that Rick Perry's veto of the texting ban actually saved lives. You'd never know it, though, if you receive all your news from the Texas MSM.

Every arm can wield a hammer: Defending Perry's veto of Texas texting ban

When Governor Rick Perry announced his vetoes, Grits praised the Governor's decision to kill legislation criminalizing texting while driving. On Tuesday, James Ragland at the Dallas News published a column excoriating Perry for the veto ("Texas goveror's logic for vetoing texting-while-driving bill seems twisted," June 22, behind paywall), declaring that "The 'logic' that Texas Gov. Rick Perry used to veto a bill that would, among other things, prohibit TWD is twisted, if not downright hypocritical," though he granted that "I don’t know if outlawing TWD would prompt Texas drivers to stop cold turkey or merely inspire them to do a better job of hiding their perilous habit."

Setting aside the difficulties of enforcement, Ragland says if Perry supports seatbelt and DWI laws, he has no justification for vetoing this bill. But I measure the issue on a different axis: Criminalizing common behaviors is a slippery slope, and Perry is at least willing to engage in a meaningful debate, unlike Ragland, regarding at what point criminalizing more drivers becomes counterproductive, charging average, law abiding citizens with criminal offenses while diverting police efforts from more serious crime.

Apparently it's come to this in the writing of criminal law, at least according to James Ragland: It's just a good thing to make criminals of non-criminals over any subject you disapprove of even if you don't think doing so will work! Criminalizing new behaviors has become so habit forming, it's the go-to move even (perhaps especially) for liberals. The real danger from the impulse, though, is that creating new crimes or "enhancing" old ones is a purely tactical and thus a bipartisan (really a trans-partisan) approach. You can theoretically criminalize anything you don't like, after all - every arm can wield a hammer. The Wichita Falls Times Record News editorial board chimed in that it was worth passing the law just "in the hopes of saving even one person." The Midland paper called the veto a "mistake."

Seemingly to counter Ragland's opinion column, but mostly reinforcing it, the News followed up by publishing an article today from reporter Erin Mulvaney giving a "both sides of the story" (sort of) account of the topic. My favorite part of the story was this quote from a National Safety Council official:

Dave Teater, a senior director for Transportation Strategic Initiatives for the National Safety Council, said texting and driving is a new threat to public health and safety and that the governor’s decision to veto the legislation was “disastrous.”

“If the state is not willing to say whether it’s right or wrong, then it implies that it is not that dangerous,” he said. “People are crashing and causing fatalities across the country. … If our government can’t be involved in public safety, I don’t know what government is good for.”

A blogger's dream. How much is wrong with that sentiment? If state law is silent on a topic, that "implies that it's not dangerous"! In court the 5th Amendment will protect you, but in the court of public opinion Mr. Teater is willing to convict states on their silence - unless they pass this bill as some sort of loyalty oath. But the proposed solution really isn't one, despite terrible anecdotes about distracted driving and cell phones which have arisen, perplexingly and counterintuitively, accepting prohibitionists' arguments, during a period when traffic deaths are declining.

As for what else is government good for besides public safety? How about "preserving rights"? That's the foundational role of American government to which Ragland and Treater's comments seem oblivious. A LOT of otherwise law abiding people use their cell phones in the car, so the proposal is to criminalize a new segment of average people, expanding the baseline pool of who may be stopped, questioned, arrested, racially profiled, etc.. significantly. 

The bill further eviscerates drivers' remaining 4th amendment rights at traffic stops. Nearly everyone now carries a phone. Criminalizing its use in the car could give officers "reasonable suspicion" at just about every traffic stop. Would it be enough for an officer to say they saw you glancing at your lap when they ask you to get out of the car, pat you down, and search your vehicle? Probably. In fact, given erosion at the Supreme Court regarding Fourth Amendment rights at traffic stops, it's quite reasonable to make a stand here that enough is enough.(I wish the Governor had found his Fourth Amendment backbone a little sooner, in fact, but that's a column for another day.)

And for this sacrifice of liberty, we get no documentable improvement in public safety. Mulvaney did at least mention countervailing research (discussed on Grits when it came out): "A study released last year by the Highway Loss Data Institute examined insurance claims in several states before and after laws were in place banning texting while driving and found that the laws did not result in fewer crashes," wrote Mulvaney, adding that "When the study was released, the institute told The Associated Press the findings 'don’t match what we already know about the risk of phoning and texting while driving.'”

Though the finding is sidestepped in the story as a one-off, I think the result makes perfect sense. Most texting drivers are younger, and young people already are at greatest risk to cause traffic accidents. They're already distracted and if this wasn't distracting them, they'd find something else; there are plenty of distractions out there to be had, after all. Meanwhile, cars are getting safer, hospitals save more lives than ever and the median age in America is rising. In other words, criminal laws have very little to do with the actual reasons traffic deaths are declining, certainly not to such an extent that they deserve such narrow, singular fetishizing as supposedly the only way government influences behavior, particularly at the level of very personal tasks like preventing "distraction."

My own views, then, lie much closer to those expressed by the lone critic of the bill (besides Perry's veto statement) quoted in the story, "Rep Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, [who] said he voted against the bill because the state already has laws against distracted driving and reckless driving, but a broad prohibition on using cellphones gives police a reason to violate the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure." Bingo! There's that other purpose of government Mr. Teater couldn't locate.

In closing, Mulvaney contacted Grits a couple of days ago to go on the record for this story, but since she didn't quote any of what I sent her, I'll republish it here to close out this entry:

We already have laws governing similar behavior and it's not needed. There are laws against reckless driving already, so on its face it's redundant if the behavior is in any way endangering others.

OTOH, if I read a text at a stoplight I don't think it harms anyone. It's already an area where civil litigation metes out liability quite successfully and criminal law has little to add. Plus studies show similar laws passed in other states simply don't reduce traffic deaths, see here.

Finally, banning everything that could distract people is just not practical or reasonable, and even if the bill became law, the state can't enforce it. Lots of things can distract you when you drive, from roadside advertising to disciplining a kid in the back seat, adjusting the radio, eating, fiddling with GPS, putting on makeup, you name it ... all the stuff people do in their cars. You can't ban it all.

All this bill has going for it is tearful anecdotes and handwringing - the policy arguments all run against it.

See related Grits posts:

• Perry vetoes new crime of texting while driving
• Study: Texting, cell phone bans don't reduce accidents
• Proposed Austin texting ban ignores commuters, reality to raise revenue
• Proposed Austin traffic ordinances hype fear, generate revenue without improving public safety
• Texting ban ignores road dangers that are more common, just as risky

Perry vetoes new crime of texting while driving

Governor Perry's vetoes are out, and they include one of his first ever criminal-justice vetoes I actually agree with! The Governor vetoed HB 242 which created penalties for a new offense of texting while driving for adults. His reasoning:

 Texting while driving is reckless and irresponsible. I support measures that make our roads safer for everyone, but House Bill 242 is a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults. Current law already prohibits drivers under the age of 18 from texting or using a cell phone while driving. I believe there is a distinction between the overreach of House Bill 242 and the government's legitimate role in establishing laws for teenage drivers who are more easily distracted and laws providing further protection to children in school zones.

The keys to dissuading drivers of all ages from texting while driving are information and education. I recommend additional education on this issue in driving safety and driver's education courses, public service ads, and announcements, and I encourage individuals and organizations that testified in favor of the anti-texting language included in this bill to work with state and local leaders to educate the public of these dangers.

I agree with pretty much everything in that veto statement. Who'da thought?

See related Grits posts:

• Study: Texting, cell phone bans don't reduce accidents
• Proposed Austin texting ban ignores commuters, reality to raise revenue
• Proposed Austin traffic ordinances hype fear, generate revenue without improving public safety
• Texting ban ignores road dangers that are more common, just as risky