28 percent of accidents involve talking, texting on cellphones

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By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A06

Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Safety Council.

The vast majority of those crashes, 1.4 million annually, are caused by cellphone conversations, and 200,000 are blamed on text messaging, according to the report from the council, a nonprofit group recognized by congressional charter as a leader on safety.

Because of the extent of the problem, federal transportation officials unveiled a organization Tuesday, patterned after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that will combat driver cellphone use. The group, FocusDriven, grew out of a meeting on distracted driving sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation in the District last year.

Virtually everyone owns a cellphone, and it's evident to anyone who drives regularly that huge numbers of people, including some who support a ban, use them while driving. Persuading people to break that habit could be a tall order for FocusDriven.

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"It's hard because everyone's addicted to their cellphone," said FocusDriven's president, Jennifer Smith, a Texan whose mother was killed by a man who ran a red light while talking on his cellphone. "That's where we come in. We put a real, human face to it. We're going to put the pressure on legislatures."

Enforcement of a texting ban requires officers to observe an act that usually is conducted in a driver's lap, and hands-free devices make it possible to talk on cellphones without being observed. More than 120 studies of cellphone use suggest that using hands-free devices doesn't eliminate the distraction caused by a phone conversation.

"It's not easy to enforce [a ban], but it's not impossible," said Chuck Hurley, executive director of MADD, who attended Tuesday's announcement of the new group's formation. "The main reason people talk on their cellphones is because they can. Eventually, [signal blocking] technology will address that."

Smith said law enforcement needs stronger laws and better tools to enforce them.

"Using a subpoena to get cellphone records has got to be a standard procedure," she said. "Perhaps cars should have a data recorder, like [an airplane's] crash recorder to use in these cases."

Whether the political will to enforce bans on cellphone use while driving exists is another matter.

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Bans on text messaging while driving illustrate the challenge. Nineteen states and the District have banned it, but in four of those states, Virginia, New York, Washington and Louisiana, the laws require that an officer have some other primary reason for stopping a vehicle.

"That makes it impossible for police to enforce it effectively," said Illinois state Sen. John J. Cullerton (D), a leading traffic safety advocate. "It's a convenient way to compromise and get bills passed in state legislatures."

Hurley put it more bluntly:

"Secondary enforcement is a huge problem," he said. "It is a sign of weak politicians. It saves very few lives."

Maryland bans drivers sending text messages but allows drivers to read them or enter phone numbers in their cellphones. Virginians stopped by police are off the hook if they say they were dialing a phone number or using a GPS device on their phone.

The challenge of legislating cellphone use by drivers is greater than similar auto safety initiatives such as those in favor of seat belts and child car seat use or against drunken driving. In each of those instances, the public safety issue was more clearly understood and, ultimately, enforcement led drivers to comply.

Hurley, who spent 21 years with the National Safety Council before joining MADD, has been involved with virtually all major traffic safety campaigns for more than three decades.

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His experience suggests that new laws and educational campaigns, such as trumpeting the startling numbers the National Safety Council released Tuesday, don't provide sufficient incentive for most drivers to change their habits.

"A lot of goodwill is created, and people die just the same," he said. "Education alone is a proven failure. Education and enforcement are a success."

He cites seat belt use as an example. The "Buckle Up for Safety" campaign was well received, but only 13 percent of drivers complied. The "Click It or Ticket" campaign has been much more effective, he said.

Public campaigns featuring mothers whose children died in crashes where drinking was a factor caught public attention, but the Operation Strikeforce efforts that employed sobriety checkpoints hammered home the consequences of drunken driving.

Hurley said the best first step for FocusDriven will be to get employers to ban use of text messaging and cellphones when driving. President Obama last year imposed a texting ban on all federal employees while using government vehicles or using government-issued phones in their own vehicles.

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Under Obama, Regulatory Agencies Step Up Enforcement - washingtonpost.com

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Consumer, Workplace Agencies More Active

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Obama administration is taking on Cheerios. And popular cold remedies and swimming pool drains and rhinestones on children's clothing.

With much of Washington focused on efforts to revamp the health-care system and address climate change, a handful of Obama appointees have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life. They are awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.

Top appointees at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, have cracked down on dietary supplements with "steroid-like" substances that for years had been sold in gyms and health-food stores. In a move designed as much for symbolism as effect, the new chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission dispatched all 100 agency inspectors across the country last month to enforce a law that requires special drains on swimming pools to prevent children from entrapment. The agency shut down more than 200 pools.

The new regulators display a passion for rules and a belief that government must protect the public from dangers lurking at home and on the job -- one more way the new White House is reworking the relationship between government and business.

"In the Bush administration, the problem was that the political folks were hostile to the mission," said Michael A. Livermore, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Regulation at New York University Law School. "We've already seen the new direction of this White House play out in other regulatory aspects -- the Environmental Protection Agency and financial regulation. With the consumer protection agencies, you're going to see a lot more stuff happening because they fit Obama's broad vision for government."

The regulators still face significant hurdles if they want to dramatically expand government's reach. Most proposed regulations have to be vetted by a central White House office headed by another new appointee, Cass R. Sunstein, whose embrace of cost-benefit analyses may mean he will discourage expensive new rules. Some efforts to expand regulation are sure to face legal challenges from industry. And the private sector is likely to assert that new regulations would be an additional burden in a weak economy.

"The argument is going to be that this is going to hurt jobs and be bad for the economy," Livermore said. "That has resonance on the Hill and within the public. . . . That's the one big challenge."

Already, some have complained that the new political leaders are overzealous.

"It's 'shoot first and ask who we shot later,' " said Gary L. Yingling, a lawyer and pharmacist who worked for a decade in the FDA general counsel's office and now represents companies regulated by the agency. "My concern is whether they've dotted their i's, crossed the t's, understand the statutory regulations and understand what the agency did yesterday. That's a real concern."

Still, waves of recalls of dangerous foods and consumer products have created pressure for stronger federal oversight. The new administration focused first on the FDA, which oversees a quarter of the U.S. economy and during George W. Bush's presidency had been faulted by consumer advocates and members of Congress for not blocking contaminated foods and drugs and faulty medical devices.

In their first few months on the job, FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg and deputy Joshua M. Sharfstein -- both with backgrounds running public health agencies -- notified General Mills that it was violating the law with its two-year-old marketing campaign that said Cheerios can lower cholesterol by 4 percent. The FDA said the company was essentially making a drug claim, which would require clinical studies and agency approval before a product is put on the market. The food giant has removed that claim from its Web site and a spokeswoman said it is in discussions with the FDA.

While the FDA began looking into Cheerios before Obama's election, several lawyers who represent food and drugmakers said they think the agency under Bush would never have taken action against General Mills.

In June, Sharfstein defied pistachio producers and told the nation to stop eating the nuts out of concern over potential salmonella contamination, even though no illnesses had been reported and just one company was involved.

That same month, the FDA warned consumers to stop using popular cold medicines, Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel and Zicam Cold Remedy swab products, citing evidence that some consumers could lose their sense of smell. The agency had known about the problem for years but had not addressed it.

"Companies must have a realistic expectation that if they are crossing the line, they will be caught, and that if they fail to act . . . we will," Hamburg told a gathering of lawyers representing food and drugmakers in August.

For industry, the costs of stronger enforcement are significant. Matrixx Initiatives, which makes Zicam, lost about $33 million as a result of the FDA's crackdown, executives told analysts.

At the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates items as varied as aquariums and wheelbarrows, the new chairman, Inez Moore Tenenbaum, said her top priority is to implement a complex new law that includes the strongest consumer protections in a generation. Among other things, the law significantly lowers the amount of lead in children's products. Trade groups that make crystal and glass rhinestones and beads for children's fashions sought an exemption; Tenenbaum and the commission have turned them down. "We are enforcing the law; that's what we do," she said.

She also directed her agency to draft a mandatory safety standard for a new off-road recreational vehicle that has a tendency to tip over and has been linked to 59 deaths. Under Tenenbaum's predecessor, the agency prompted manufacturers to offer free repairs that were supposed to improve safety. But Tenenbaum has gone further -- pushing for a mandatory standard that would force the company to redesign the vehicle. The five-member commission has to approve a mandatory standard; the last time it took similar action was 2001.

Tenenbaum's determination to enforce the law is a reversal from her predecessor, said CPSC Commissioner Nancy A. Nord, a former lobbyist for Eastman Kodak who argued against many aspects of that law.

At the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, acting head Jordan Barab has already rankled the business community by reviving a hot-button issue -- rules to protect workers from repetitive-strain injuries. The injuries affect laborers from computer keyboard operators to poultry processors and cause about 60 percent of workplace injuries, according to OSHA studies.

The business community has long argued that ergonomics standards are not based on sound science and will require the costly redesign of millions of workplaces. Furthermore, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others say that repetitive strain injuries are specific to workplaces and broad government standards won't work as well as voluntary programs adopted by individual businesses.

Barab led the last attempt to enact ergonomics standards while at OSHA during the Clinton administration, when the GOP-controlled Congress and Bush repealed the rules two months after they took effect.

Awaiting Senate approval is Obama's nominee for OSHA director, David Michaels, an Energy Department assistant secretary under President Bill Clinton, who could further ruffle feathers. He has become a recent target of conservative bloggers, who say he is hostile to certain industries. Michaels has called for a more aggressive OSHA, saying that illnesses and death have resulted from the agency not issuing workplace safety rules. He also has argued that tobacco, chemical and other industries have exploited scientific uncertainty to slow or kill federal regulation, even when aware their products pose health risks. Public health organizations have applauded his selection.

Barab is unapologetic about an aggressive approach. "The law says that employers are responsible for workplace safety and health," he said in June. "And there's a new sheriff in town to enforce the law."

Bank Regulators Resist Reform

By Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

The nation's banking regulators are defying pressure from the Obama administration to line up in support of key proposed reforms, testifying before Congress on Tuesday that elements of the plan would actually weaken oversight of the financial industry.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner summoned the heads of half a dozen agencies for a caustic scolding Friday and told them they were interfering unacceptably in a political process, according to people familiar with the meeting.

The warning, however, had no discernible impact on testimony Tuesday, as four of the regulators who were reprimanded told the Senate Banking Committee they had particular concerns about a centerpiece of the plan, the proposed creation of a new agency to protect consumers of bank products, including mortgages and credit cards.

The resistance comes as progress has stalled on other key administration initiatives, notably climate change and health-care reform. Organized opposition has fostered growing public skepticism, undermining the administration's prospects.

While Republicans on the banking committee welcomed the regulators' dissent, leading congressional Democrats said the basic elements of financial reform command a much broader consensus than the embattled initiatives. These Democrats said they remained confident they would pass a comprehensive regulatory bill by year's end.

"For someone who's involved in health care and this, this is very different," said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Banking Committee, and also a leading player on health care. "We remain in very good shape" on regulatory reform.

Working Over Recess

Democrats plan to begin writing legislation during the August recess, working from hundreds of pages of polished drafts the administration has sent to guide the process.

The broad outlines of the plan remain stable after months of hearings -- Dodd said his committee has held 28 hearings on the subject -- and increasingly heated lobbying by industry and consumer groups. Democrats want to give the government new power to oversee large financial companies and important markets, and to shut down troubled firms in an orderly fashion. They want to create a consumer protection agency, removing that responsibility from banking regulators. And they want to rein in Wall Street, including by placing limits on bonuses and restricting investments made with borrowed money.

"These things are going to happen," said Steven Adamske, a spokesman for Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. "It's complicated. It's not easy to do, but we are trudging through it."

The idea of a new agency to protect consumers has proved particularly popular on Capitol Hill, forcing some critics to drop their outright opposition and instead press for its powers to be circumscribed. The heads of the regulatory agencies argued Tuesday that the new agency should write rules, but that banking regulators should continue to ensure that companies comply with those rules, and punish those that do not.

Enforcement of consumer protection laws "should stay with the bank regulators, where it works well," said John Dugan, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and John E. Bowman, acting head of the Office of Thrift Supervision, also argued that banking regulators should retain enforcement powers. Federal Reserve Governor Daniel K. Tarullo declined to take a position, but senior Fed officials have said they want to retain that power, too.

New Dedication

Regulators, who under the proposals would maintain responsibility for bank health, argue that protecting consumers is a vital aspect of that job. While acknowledging failures in recent years, the agency officials argue that they are newly committed to consumer protection.

Administration officials have dismissed these arguments, saying that the record of failing to protect consumers, ensure the health of banks and prevent the financial crisis speaks for itself. Some legislators were equally dismissive.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the regulators' arguments were motivated by "turf, turf, turf."

Republicans, by contrast, celebrated the regulators' concerns as evidence of independent opposition to the administration's plan.

The ranking Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, asked each witness to affirm that their testimony "was not in any way influenced by Secretary Geithner's tirade against you the other day?"

An administration official expressed few concerns about the debate on Capitol Hill.

"In the scheme of lawmaking, we're doing quite well," said Michael S. Barr, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for financial institutions. Barr also offered a milder account of the Friday meeting. "We were having a conversation," he said. "We told them, 'As each of you pursue your own points of view, let's not lose sight' " of the broader goal of achieving financial reform.

Another person familiar with Geithner's remarks said he warned that regulators were impeding the progress by sniping at details.

The hour-long meeting at the Treasury included the four regulators who testified as well as Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Geithner's confrontation with the regulators was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.