VANCOUVER, Wash. — The small group of students who showed up at the Heritage High School student parking lot on a bitterly cold morning Saturday were there to convince themselves of what most of them already know, if they’re honest: Texting and driving can be a lethal combination.
For this exercise, the stakes were low: A golf cart substituted for a street-legal vehicle. There were no other cars, cyclists or pedestrians to avoid. The 80 orange traffic cones that marked the route could, and did, survive direct hits.
But as Clark County Sheriff’s Deputy James Phelps reminded students who volunteered as guinea pigs, if those traffic cones had been people, the parking lot would have been a scene of carnage.
Kendrick Spiller’s class project at Heritage involved running volunteers through an obstacle course, first on a dry run, then while sending and receiving text messages, and comparing their times and errors. Running a stop sign counted as an error. So did hitting a cone.
Steering the 4-foot-wide golf cart through a 6-foot-wide lane rattled some students. Trying to multitask, cell phone in hand, while navigating hairpin turns rattled them more.
Spiller is enrolled in a marketing studies class at Heritage and belongs to the school’s DECA club, an organization for marketing students. He’s planning to write a 30-page paper on the project and produce a public service announcement.
The project, which he calls TTYL GTG DRV (talk to you later, got to go drive) is a spin-off from a Vermont program called turnofftexting.
At the parking lot Saturday, you didn’t have to be a licensed driver to take part.
Keon King, 14, gave it a try, though he strained to see over the steering wheel. He made six errors.
“I’m a little scared,” he admitted before the test. “The only driving I do is dirt-biking.”
Most of the messages exchanged between driver and designated texter were pretty cursory, along the lines of “Hi, how’s it going.” Some drivers found they had to stop the cart and concentrate on the keyboard even to manage that much.
Spiller was unable to send off more than a simple text.
“It’s a whole lot harder to text and drive than I expected,” he said.
Melissa Gipe said she found it harder to text while driving the obstacle course than in real life. She hit five cones.
“Usually when I do my texting, I’m on the freeways,” she said, raising the sheriff’s deputies’ eyebrows. “If I were driving around town, I’d probably hit a lot of people.”
Despite overwhelming evidence about the perils of distracted driving, “everyone” continues to text and drive, Gipe admitted.
“It almost like a drug or something. They need to have that constant contact.”
The 2010 Washington Legislature got serious about texting — and talking on cell phones — while driving.
Beginning in 2008, it was a secondary violation to text or talk while driving, meaning a driver could be cited only if stopped for committing a primary violation, such as speeding, at the same time.
But this year, distracted driving became a primary offense. Since June, police may now pull a driver over for sliding a cell phone to an ear or typing a simple phrase. A driver ticketed for talking or texting can expect a $124 fine.
The lethal consequence of distracted driving hit home at Hudson’s Bay High School in September 2009, when popular teacher Gordon Patterson was struck and killed by a driver who was texting while Patterson was riding his bicycle home from school in a bike lane.
Patterson’s brother, Dwight, is on the faculty at Heritage. The tragedy has heightened sensitivity to the issue there, students said.
Phelps delivered some sobering statistics: More than 90 percent of Americans now have cell phones. Two-thirds admit to texting while driving. The practice cost an estimated 16,000-plus lives between 2001 and 2007. Some studies show that texting while driving can be more impairing than driving with a 0.08 percent blood alcohol level.
Phelps agreed to drive the obstacle course himself, though he said, “I never, ever text.”
After acquainting himself with an unfamiliar cell phone, he carefully navigated the course, coming to a virtual full stop while sending off a brief text.
“Part of it is trying to go from distance vision to 6-inch vision,” he said after climbing out of the cart.
The exercise was useful to teens, he concluded.
“I think it really shows how much they overrate their ability to multi-task while driving.”
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