Howard E. Greenberg leaves his New Rochelle home armed for business with a personal digital assistant on one hip and a cell phone on the other. Like many in business who keep current with technology and keep close company with a PDA, he”™s never away from the office, even when driving his car.
“I”™m an information junkie,” said the president of Howard Properties Limited, a real estate consulting company in White Plains. “Everybody in my field is an information junkie.”
While driving, Greenberg feeds his need-to-know habit on the one hand with his cell phone, staying legal with a Bluetooth hands-free mobile system he bought in February. (It”™s a speaker phone, so Greenberg”™s passengers are forewarned of what inevitably might be overheard.) On the other hand, he”™ll check text messages on his BlackBerry, but never while moving.
The tenant representative thinks there ought to be no law that enforces the obvious. Sending text messages while driving your car? There ought not be a law banning that, he said.
As of March 9, 2009, however, Westchester County will begin enforcing just that. Getting a jump on what could become state law, with ban bills pending in the state Legislature, county legislators last month adopted a local law that prohibits the use of wireless handsets to compose, read or send text messages while driving a motor vehicle. Violators will be fined $150 for each texting-while-driving violation.
“To me, that is almost like passing a law that you can”™t drive a car blindfolded,” said Greenberg.
Still, people do it. In a report this year on “driving while distracted” sponsored by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., about eight in 10 cell phone owners said they talked on their phones while driving. Of the 83 per cent of drivers who owned a cell phone, only 36 percent used a hands-free device. About one in five, 18 percent, of cell phone owners said they send text messages while driving. Use of a cell phone or email or other electronic device while driving was by far the most dangerous distraction cited among drivers surveyed.
Of multitasking drivers, 48 percent said they were dealing in transit with urgent work or school matters, while 41 percent said they were staying connected with work or school. For “Generation Y” drivers, ages 18 through 30, 56 percent said they were urgently working while driving; 52 percent of “Generation X” drivers, ages 31 through 44, said they did the same. For Greenberg”™s “Boomer” age peers, 38 percent of multitasking drivers were taking care of urgent business.
Text-messaging has been cited as a factor in several fatal driving accidents in recent years, as legislators noted when proposing the law. Most recently, National Transportation Safety Board investigators this month said the engineer of a commuter train that collided in September with a freight train in Los Angeles, Calif., killing 25 people, was sending text messages on his cell phone seconds before the crash. Currently two states, Washington and New Jersey, expressly prohibit texting while driving; no-texting legislation is pending in several others.
In Westchester, “People have told me that they do it,” Greenberg said. “It”™s being foolish to do it. You”™re not only affecting yourself. You”™re affecting everybody else on the road.”
“I do not look at my BlackBerry unless I”™m absolutely stopped,” Greenberg said. “That means a red light or parked.”
Under the new law, only one of those practices will be legal. The law allows a driver to put hands to a handset inside a vehicle that is either inoperable or parked, standing or stopped and removed from the traffic flow. Public safety and emergency workers on duty and drivers contacting them by text message also are exempted.
One”™s car is not the only place where texting might be a dangerous distraction. In a new work-life study from Sheraton Hotels and Resorts in White Plains, 85 percent of professionals in the U.S. said they feel compelled by modern technology to be connected to work 24 hours a day. And nearly nine of 10 professionals, 87 percent, said they bring their PDAs to the bedroom. Almost as many, 85 percent, sneak a peek in the middle of the night.
