By Dan Reider
The new hands-free driving law in South Carolina that takes effect Monday is long overdue.
Thousands of lives have been lost while the legislation failed repeatedly.
The first state to pass a law making it illegal for drivers to hold cellphones when driving was New York in 2001. More than two-thirds of states have followed. (South Carolina became No. 33.) And all states except Montana have a no-texting-while-driving law.
In 2023, distracted driving resulted in the deaths of 3,275 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which reported that “texting is the most alarming distraction.”
According to the National Safety Council, more than 12% of fatal crashes in 2023 due to distracted driving involved cellphone use. That’s a percentage largely unchanged for several years.
In September 2023, the cellphone comparison site WhistleOut graded state cellphone bans across three categories. South Carolina was among five to receive a D grade for not having a handheld ban or young driver cellphone ban.
The new law in South Carolina still allows cellphone use when the driver is stopped at a light. It has already gotten very frustrating for many of us while at lights which have turned green and one of the cars in front of us don’t move for a while — sometime to the point that the light turns red again before we get to the intersection.
With the new hands-free law, will it be any surprise if more drivers get on their phones waiting for the light to change?
Unfortunately, this law does not go nearly far enough to improve the safety on our roads.
Drivers rarely face consequences for breaking other laws. When raining during the day, most drivers have enough sense that when they turn on their windshield wipers, they also turn on their headlights. But some do not. A much larger number of drivers don’t seem to ever use or infrequently use their turn signals when turning or changing lanes.
Those rules of the road are hard to effectively enforce and would require substantially increasing law enforcement on the roads and that, clearly, is not going to happen.
There are some other things government officials can do but will require more effort and money.
For example, the Biden administration had a committee working for about three years on technology that would keep intoxicated drivers from operating a vehicle. But the committee did not meet its 2024 deadline for recommendations.
Another technology being implemented in several other countries is that of vehicle speed control. A device installed in the vehicle can slow a vehicle down if it’s traveling over the posted speed limit.
Imagine if we required that on all vehicles in the United States — if, say on Interstate 20 or Interstate 26, where the posted speed is 60 mph, a vehicle couldn’t travel more than 65 mph.
Accidents and deaths would be reduced, and we might even be able to save millions of dollars in road construction costs with all vehicles driving at a more reasonable speed.
But this approach lacks support.
So, what else, if anything, could have been done in South Carolina to make our roads safer?
Vastly increasing the number of law enforcement vehicles on the road could cut down on speeding. But even if that happens, the results would be limited: Stopping a vehicle, going through the license checks, writing a citation, etc. is just so time-consuming that only a very small number of vehicles could be cited in an hour.
In addition, cars tend to slow down when they see a law enforcement vehicle and speed up once they are out of sight of that vehicle.
To help resolve this problem, we could equip unmarked law enforcement vehicles with cameras and radar to catch speeders without needing to stop them. When a vehicle is going X mph over the speed limit, the cameras would record the vehicle along with the license tag and vehicle speed for maybe 10 seconds.
The enforcement vehicle’s computer would then locate the address of the vehicle’s owner and generate a citation that included the speed, time, and location of the incident.
This would allow law enforcement vehicles to send 10, 20 or more tickets every hour. Points on the driver’s license could not be assessed since there is no verification of who was driving, but after receiving a speeding ticket or two, I would hope the driver would slow down.
I can only guess how many persons might have lived or survived without severe injuries if we had addressed cellphone use 10 or 20 years ago. We now have great technology available to us if only we would consider using it.
Why are we not doing more to save lives on the road?
Dan Reider worked for 40-plus years as a mechanical engineer designing primarily educational facilities, healthcare facilities, and performing arts centers. Upon leaving private practice, he began his new career as a project manager in the University of South Carolina’s construction and planning department. He lives in Lexington.
