Distracted driving is a scourge. Iowa needs a hands-free law now.
In less than a month, the 2024 Iowa Legislature will begin its work, even before the Iowa Caucuses. We can expect divisive proposals to soak up a lot of time and attention, but here’s a wish for lawmakers to quickly take one simple, popular and overdue action for the sake of everybody’s safety.
It’s long past time to make it illegal for drivers to use a phone or any other handheld electronic device while driving. Legislation to make that happen has stalled out several times, including in 2023.
Scholars debate the precise contribution of distracted driving to deaths and severe injuries on the road. But almost all the reasons drivers get distracted — reading a text, navigating a call, thinking that a stretch of open highway is familiar and deserted enough to permit watching a video — boil down to impatience or boredom.
In a 2020 survey, over a third of respondents told the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Trip that they’d read text messages while driving in the previous 30 days. Trip also says the nationwide number of deaths tied to distraction-affected crashes grew 13% from 2019 to 2021.
Iowa's hands-free-driving proposal is popular, so don't wait on it
The agencies that police Iowa roads, including the Iowa State Patrol, have vocally supported a hands-free law, something 34 other states have. Lawmakers have heard tragic stories about the inadequacy of current law that makes it illegal only to “write, send, or view an electronic message.” After a woman was run down on her bicycle in 2017, the distracted driver was acquitted because it wasn’t clear under the law whether his attention to his phone was criminal.
Many legislators have also expressed enthusiasm. Senate File 547, which includes reasonable exceptions when handling a device would be allowed, was approved 47-0 this spring and advanced through an Iowa House committee in late March. But it was never brought up on the House floor before the session adjourned five weeks later. The House could still consider the same bill in the 2024 session.
Leaders should act early on and not risk it slipping off the map again.
Other issues that make roads dangerous need attention, too
An analysis published in the New York Times this week noted that, unlike in other countries, pedestrian deaths in the United States have been increasing for a decade, and that the increase was tied almost completely to a sharp increase in pedestrians being killed at night. Other countries have smartphones, too, so there aren’t simple and obvious explanations. The story didn’t reach definitive conclusions, but one hypothesis is that American drivers’ unusual preference for automatic over manual transmissions contributes to lower focus and more distraction.
Other factors are big contributors to unsafe roads. The profiles of vehicles keep getting larger, making it more difficult to see the ground in front of and behind them. Street systems for decades were engineered with the primary goal of conveying as many cars and trucks as possible as quickly as possible, which helps encourage speeding and leaves cyclists and pedestrians as an afterthought. One of the premises of Des Moines’ Vision Zero initiative is aggressively updating or remaking portions of streets to be more friendly to all users.
More: Des Moines' Vision Zero plan to cut traffic deaths approved by city council. Here's what's next:
We need a culture shift against distracted driving. Let's start with the law.
Allowing law enforcement to write $100 tickets won’t stop distracted driving. Indiana passed a hands-free law in 2020 and has handed out over 10,000 citations, but the number of crashes involving distraction went up from 2021 to 2022, according to television station WISH of Indianapolis.
But making the law more strict is a necessary step in a longer haul to change culture and habits. Safety advocates often point out that driving drunk and not wearing seat belts used to be considered unremarkable choices. Laws did not change those habits overnight. In time, though, seat belts became the expectation and drunken driving became more stigmatized. The expectation and penalties in the law are a building block.
As of Dec. 13, 358 people have died in crashes this year in Iowa. Drivers make mistakes. But distracted-driving mistakes are needless and preventable. The Legislature should make clear the expectation that drivers in Iowa will focus on that task.
— Lucas Grundmeier, on behalf of the Register editorial board
This editorial is the opinion of the Des Moines Register's editorial board: Carol Hunter, executive editor; Lucas Grundmeier, opinion editor; and Richard Doak and Rox Laird, editorial board members.
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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: A hands-free-driving law is overdue in Iowa. Here's why.
