Virginia Laws on Texting While Driving

We have posted before on this site about the dangers of texting while driving, and we have also discussed recent efforts of Virginia lawmakers to stiffen the penalties for texting drivers.

We are compelled to post again, however, since learning of the case of a family right here in Herndon who lost their son to a traffic accident that was caused when a driver made an unsafe, and fatal decision to text while driving.  This young man was struck and killed on Route 7. Although the driver was charged by the police with “reckless driving,” the Traffic Court judge could not convict him of reckless driving because in Virginia, reckless driving can only be proven if the driver was drinking or driving at excessive speed (currently,texting while driving is a secondary offense and is punishable by a $20 fine).

Herndon Personal Injury Lawyer Doug Landau applauds the efforts of  Herndon Delegate to the Virginia Legislature, Tom Rust, who submitted a bill to toughen Virginia’s laws on texting while driving.  A similar bill submitted last year was left in committee.  The bill submitted will make texting while driving a primary offense.

The facts are clear when it comes to texting while driving based on a study conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute:

• Of all cell phone related tasks – including talking, dialing, or reaching for the phone – texting while driving is the most dangerous.
• Teen drivers are four times more likely than adults to get into car crashes or near crash events directly related to talking on a cell phone or texting.
• A truck driver texting while driving is 23.2 times more likely to get into an accident than a trucker paying full attention to the road.
• For every 6 seconds of drive time, a driver sending or receiving a text message spends 4.6 of those seconds with their eyes off the road. This makes texting the most distracting of all cell phone related tasks.