Board Urges Cellphone Ban for All Commercial Drivers
Joe Imel/Daily News, via Associated Press— In a 2010 Kentucky crash that killed 11 people, a truck driver made four cellphone calls in the minutes before hitting a van.
By MATTHEW L. WALD and MATT RICHTEL
NYT
WASHINGTON —After a Kentucky truck crash that killed 11 people, top federal safety investigators vastly broadened their recommendations on cellphones on Tuesday and said all commercial drivers should be forbidden to use them, whether hand-held or not, except in emergencies.
The Department of Transportation is already considering a rule to ban the nation’s 3.7 million commercial drivers from talking on cellphones; last year it banned them from texting. “It’s just too dangerous,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who described himself as being “on a rampage” on the subject.
The recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is an advisory body, represents an evolving understanding of the hazards of cellphone use by drivers. After an accident in 2002, the board recommended banning cellphone use by rookie drivers, and after a bus crash in 2004, by bus drivers. And because of a 2010 accident in Philadelphia involving a barge and an amphibious vessel carrying tourists, and a 2008 collision between two trains in Chatsworth, Calif., the board recommended banning the use of cellphones for commercial operators of railroad and marine transportation.
“Distracted driving is becoming increasingly prevalent, exacerbating the danger we encounter daily on our roadways,” said the chairwoman of the safety board, Deborah A. P. Hersman. “It can be especially lethal when the distracted driver is at the wheel of a vehicle that weighs 40 tons and travels at highway speeds.” Mr. LaHood referred to such trucks as “80,000-pound unguided missiles.”
(More here.)
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