Portland chief wants to fine cell phone users

If Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood has his way, people who talk on cellular telephones while driving in his city could find their conversations abruptly interrupted by a cruiser’s blue lights and a $50 summons.

Chitwood said last week that he will ask the City Council to support an ordinance that would make it illegal for anyone but emergency personnel to use cell phones while driving in the city. The proposal would make Portland the first community in Maine, and one of the first in New England, to crack down on the growing number of inattentive motormouths and the risks they pose on the roads.

Chitwood said he intends to start collecting the accident data necessary to support the measure.

The controversial proposal, which is certain to make some people cry foul and others shout hallelujah, came shortly after Brookline, Mass., adopted its own ban on the use of phones while driving.

The Ohio town of Brooklyn began lightly fining its car-phone users in September, and last month Suffolk County on Long Island, N.Y., became the first county in the nation to enact similar legislation.

While Chitwood is convinced that talking on the phone while driving is a hazardous, perhaps lethal, combination, so far he’s only got anecdotal evidence from police officers and his own gut instinct to back up his claim.

State Trooper Leonard Bolton told the Portland Press Herald of suspected drunk drivers who, it turned out, were weaving not from the effects of booze but because they were too wrapped up in phone conversations to pay attention to the road. Chitwood has said that he felt compelled to stop talking behind the wheel when he realized that the phone conversations made him lose track of where he was going.

But Portland Mayor Cheryl Leeman, who sometimes uses her phone while driving, said she couldn’t support Chitwood’s ambitious proposal unless his traffic statistics can prove that car phones really are to blame for accidents in the city.

Bangor Police Chief Donald Winslow said he feels the same way at this point.

“I wish I had the empirical data that would prove that accidents are caused specifically by cell phones, but I don’t,” Winslow said. “But it’s a safe assumption that cell phones do distract drivers from what they should be doing, and driver inattention is one of the leading causes of traffic accidents in our community.”

Although he believes Chitwood’s idea has merit, Winslow said he is not ready to argue for a similar ordinance for Bangor’s streets.

“Officially, there have been no accidents brought to my attention that were determined to be directly related to cell phones,” he said. “We haven’t kept that data. But, yes, I would have to logically assume that it’s happening.”

The biggest problem for police, as several national studies have already suggested, is in trying to distinguish the distraction caused by talking on the phone from the dozens of other distractions that so many drivers blithely engage in these days. People have been known to change their clothes while cruising down the highway. Some of them brush their teeth or put on make-up or do their hair. Some of them turn around to deal with kids in the back seat, or light cigarettes, or fiddle with the radio dials.

None of these activities, of course, are even remotely related to the driver’s one most pressing obligation, which is to steer the car safely from one place to another.

“It’s unbelievable what goes on,” Winslow said. “I mean, you see people eating lunch and reading as they drive. I was behind a guy the other day, in fact, who I thought was drunk because he was weaving. It turned out he was reading a

book. He’d look up at the road and then back down into his lap, up and down.”

Attempting to single out cell-phone distraction as the chief culprit in accidents is a tricky enough business, in fact, that most law enforcement agencies haven’t even considered it. That attitude may be slowly changing, however. Pennsylvania and Montana just recently chose to follow the example of the state police of Oklahoma and Minnesota in listing cell phones as factors when making out accident reports.

“At this point,” said Chief Winslow, “I’m not ready to jump into this and say that banning cell-phone use in cars is the direction our city ought to take. But I will be very interested in what Portland does with the ordinance and whether it actually can reduce the number of accidents.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.