288-133. senator reid got 51 votes in a senate where many democrats were outcome paining for president. a lot of republicans supported him. the speculators said to themselves, oh, my god, these guys are serious. the price went from 147 in july to 30 in december. but then nothing happens. >> thank you very much. >> mr. guilford, let me ask you to comment, if you would. >> i think that, that the senator's bill is a great way to start. i agree with professor greenberger. i think in context, remember that the commodities futures trading commission's position limits rule at least initially was designed to do exactly what we're talking about here today. unfortunately, at least initially its limits were set so extraordinarily high as not to be terribly effective. it will take time for them in order to collect the data necessary in order to make sure the setting the limits in the right place in the right way and make sure it is the most effective.

that is exactly the administrative process that progrefr greenering -- professor greenberger talks about that will sake so long. couple that the financial services industry made it clear it will litigate every single one of these rules that comes out of every single one of these agencies for as long as it takes to litigate testimony because they know they're playing for time. . .

>> ms. edwards? >> thank you very much. and thank you to our witnesses today. and i really appreciate that you put into context what consumers are feeling. most of us, barring a class or two in undergraduate school or otherwise, have no idea about market economics, about the commodities market, and about how that impacts things like the food that would buy at a gas that would put in our cars. so i appreciate that. and it was helpful to hear, just a reminder about supply and demand and relationship between supply and demand, and what should be the price. as you stated, professor greenberger, supplies are up. they are plentiful. demand is down, and prices really should reflect and they simply don't. i filled up my tank a we can have ago and was $4 for a

gallon. i filled out my take after church on sunday, this pass on and it was $4.10 a gallon. that was just a week, a weeks time. and here, i hear $10 billion i think mr. guilford, people don't understand those numbers. they are just so incredible for those of us who haven't been privileged enough to win a lottery. i wonder if you could tell me, in the $4.10 that i spent for a gallon of gas on sunday, how much should i pay for that gallon of gas? >> that's a great question. if you, if you come if you follow the logic of much of the conversation that you've heard here today, and there will be widely differing opinions about the degree to speculation in and of itself as contributing to this problem, you have a range of opinions from the chief executive of exxon mobil, between 65 and $70 is the fair price to everything over that is

speculative. two weeks ago you have the federal reserve bank of st. louis indicating 15% is speculation. so even if you're to cut it down the middle, even if you were to just split the difference between the two, instead of spending $4, you should be spinning something closer to $3. for your gallon of gasoline. $10 billion is a big number. so let me put it in the context that i think some may be more comfortable with. congressman larson is way with people who work with me, and at my school. i have a lady who is a single mother, raising two children by herself. she has to come back and forth to work every day. in december, she was paying about $45 a week for gas. now she is paying 70. you all work very hard after the first of the year in what looked like an extraordinarily difficult task to give every

working american a payroll tax cut. so that lady who works for me, raising those two children, all of the payroll tax cut that she received now goes into paying only to get her back and forth to work. so for whatever good intentions you may have had, in helping people like the people who i work with, it has now gone entirely for the higher price of gasoline. >> thank you. i really appreciate that because that really does say exactly what we're talking about, the single mother pain from what was $45 for a tank of gas, now paying $70 has effectively lost all of the tax increase that we provided for her at the beginning of the year. $4.10 a gallon, i've got to get the correct, that i paid on sunday should have been up $3.10 a gallon.

and that's what americans are paying. so i really thank you very much for being able to help us understand the details, but to put into real context in terms of what it is costing the american people. thank you, and i yield. >> thank you. mr. scott. >> thank you. thank you very much ms. delauro, and thank you, leader pelosi, and others for convening this mean. it is complicated and it's good to see some good information. both of you have spoken about the legitimate futures market and speculation but that was one of the problems we had with the credit default swaps where you had ensuring against all laws in mortgages might be legitimate but when you allow many people to bet on the same package of mortgages, that's just raw speculation. we have the centuries old principles of insurance.

basically what you're buying is insurance, and the two fundamental principles, one come if you still in charge of to have assets to back up your promise. and the second is you can only buy insurance where you have an insurable interest. i can't buy fire insurance on your house. what they were doing was leading dozens of people buy fire insurance on the house, so when you have a loss of a house all of a sudden you unload all of these losses. exactly how much of this speculation problem could be cured if we went back to just fundamental principles of insurance and required before you start selling insurance that you could only sell it to people with insurable interest? >> while the gambling aspects of the subprime meltdown and what we're seeing today are similar, the investment vehicles that are being used are different. and what you are talking about,

congressman scott, is something that the dodd-frank did a really good job on, not a complete job, but a good job. because you had people like john paulson who placed bets, the tranches of sub prime say he didn't on with the. he made $4 billion in 2007 betting that people would be kicked out of their houses, without having lent any of the money to those people. by the way, the european union, we did not in dodd-frank just say stop again with. we said make it transparent so that everybody can see it. that will be therapeutic, but the european union and the european sovereign debt crisis, angela merkel, sarkozy, got the european commission to say, people were betting that southern european countries would fail without having lent them any money. they had a synthetic bet that

they would fail but and the european commission said stop. >> but if they lent the money it would be legitimate -- >> they didn't want to lend the money. >> that's why the insurable interest would be the hedge. >> that's exactly right. and ironically, as dodd-frank was working his way through, insurance commission for me in florida to say credit default swaps are insurance, and they are ensuring somebody else's risk. since 1806 when parliament said you can do that because people were ensuring cargoes on british ships and then calling the french navy to bomb the ships and clicking the insurance, they didn't own the arco. parlor preshot to the. the interest commission want to put a stop to the. suddenly within the dodd-frank, god knows how it happened, insurance law, state insurance law was preempted. >> should they go back to that, where we insist on insurable

interest? >> yes, you should. but, frankly, what i would do is consider what the european union did on that front as well. the gambling on whether greece will fall without lending money to greece is not a productive investment. it's a destructive investment. the european commission said no, we're not going to do that anymore. so i wouldn't say, just he got to injury own interest. i which is a stop this. your approach would be good. final point at which is a, we have a different problem in this market. this is pure and simple going into a bookshop and think i want to bet on the upward direction. >> when there is no insurable interest. let me ask another quick question before time runs out. whether or not we're making enough use out of the strategic petroleum reserve, whether or not we ought to increase it, use it more, not just on catastrophic national security

problems, but more generally for price stability? >> i think, first to go back to your earlier question if i could very briefly, i think what you're trying to get to if i understand your question correctly is that those of an interest in actual delivery or can take delivery of the materials that are being transacted in these markets ought to be the ones who are the participants in these markets. and going back to the material that a read to you from one of the promotional items from wall street, what they are promoting are people who will never take delivery of, nor with the deliver anything into these markets. they are merely placing bets on the daily movement of the prices of these commodities. and for those of us who are in heating oil country, for example, as some of you are around the spell, it means that instead of a local heating retailer of the type we represent, who goes into the marketplace and buys contracts so that at retailer in turnaround to consumers and

offer consumers a fixed price or a capped price plan for the winter, he is buying his contract or she is buying her contract on the market and is taking advantage of the options that are a fable in order to stabilize his or her price. as these are being inflated constantly and churned constantly, it is costing more and more money for the small retailers to be able to engage in these transactions, which means it's costing consumers more money. so what professor greenberger is talking about is to be able to puncture this bubble and bring the prices down. with respect to the strategic petroleum reserve, i guess i could be counted as among those because it was a year ago february actually that i was in representative delauro's office as we were working on the statement in anticipation of military action in libya about the president's announcement for the potential release of the

strategic petroleum reserve at that time. and it indeed is strategic when you use it for that purpose. you announce your intention, you announce your intention. much like what professor greenberger was talking about when he said that they can have a huge problem of this marketplace at the department of justice were to announce that is going to undertake a massive and serious investigation of what is going on in these markets. the threat of that alone is a huge sort of passionate over the neck of wall street. added to that, the threat, that's what we're talking about a year ago, representative delauro, a year ago was the threat that the united states was willing to do whatever was necessary in conjunction with allies to make sure an adequate amount of crude oil was available in the marketplace each day, including but not limited to the use of the strategic petroleum reserve if it became necessary. that threat is an incredibly important weapon that is available to you. understanding that we don't have a problem with a shortage of crude oil today.

if you were to go to cushion oklahoma if you're took onto the dash met with the president, cushion oklahoma is awash in oil. there's no problem with the physical supply of the product. none whatsoever. >> mr. moran. >> thank you very much. i think our leadership are having this hearing. i'm wondering how long this can last, and how high prices can go. normally in the commodities markets you have a boom and bust cycle your it's occurred with gold, with basically, orange juice, everything. it would seem that there must be some people, john paulson's of the world, if you would, that are looking for opportunities to buy puts order to sell short,

swaps, ready to again gain the volatility of the market. or is there a uniqueness to this market? >> i'd like to hear from both of you. >> this is a bubble, and the bubble will burst. the last big bubble went from 147 to 30 and six months but no one saw that coming. goldman was predicting it would be 200 when it was at 30. but i've got to do something. we don't know when the bubble will burst. in the meantime, as we've said, people are spending money they probably don't even have come or not buying medicine they need are not paying their rent to pay for gas. that could trigger a recession. if we don't have t.a.r.p. in the fed when which i don't think politically we can have the next time, we are told by economists that could be a depression.

so when the bubble bursts we may already be flat on the back. the fact that gasoline is down to $1.50, let's say, may mean nothing if we have unemployment up to 15, 16, 17%. >> well, i agree with you clearly that congress needs to take action, although just between us and the cameras, that's not going to happen as long as the majority in the house of representatives are owned by the industries. i want to ask you another question though, because we have a figure here that says that for every penny more we pay at the pump, the profits for the five largest oil companies go up by $200 million. is there any kind of collusion going on? army, we have got a credible figure from head of exxon mobil, but they are profiting, are they not, from this speculation? so it's all good for them. and, of course, when the price

per barrel drops, the price at the pump are not going to drop proportionately. they will keep a larger and larger share. that's what's happened every time. their profits go up as prices go down. is that not true? >> two things. first, as professor greenberger pointed, 2008 is incredibly instructive in this regard. in march of 2008 crude was $70. by july it was 147. by november it had fallen to 30. by the next market was back at 70. that's an extraordinary roller coaster $2,017,000,000,000,000 economy through. 70 to 147. no one, no one with a straight face, could look at you in the eye and tell you that india, that's china. we had some extraordinary weather event. no, we didn't get there was some interference in the marketplace

that was posing such an extortionist circumstance that the key to go to 147. no. i'm sorry. that didn't happen either. >> so it could only be market manipulation speak was what else could it have been? they did not exist. what could possibly the supply and depend fundamental's? it would be almost as though someone were to say to you everyone in china and india decide to drive their car in july, that drove do. in a park the cars by the fall and that's why it went down. it's absurd. with respect to your question about profits. first of all, every single day that you are a report on the news about what happens on the commodity markets, every single day, by that evening, for publication the next morning, the commodity market movements gets translated into what happened on the fiscal markets. the wholesale rises that are people paying.

they follow almost in lockstep. so there is no question that what goes on on wall street as a direct causal effect on ultimately what is made by virtue of what is charged to the general public and the price of the products that they pay. it's actually the case. there's a direct causal relationship between the commodity markets and the prices charged in the fiscal markets. we watch them every day. and the absurdity of some of this, you know, shouldn't be lost on anyone. i will pick on heating oil again. we just came through a heating oil season where we had virtually no winter, right? representative markey, we had no winter a poem, golf courses were open all winter long. it was extraordinary. the measurement of cold that we use which are degree days was down by 25%. the volumes that were sold by your heating retailers went down by a third.

extraordinary. i mean, an extraordinary weather events. then why under those circumstances with the commodity cost of heating oil today be $3.22 quick you can't give what heating oil. you can't. 70 degrees most of february, for god's sake. we are talking about a difference between the price of the barrel of crude and the price of a barrel of heating oil. the price of a barrel of crude is 104. the price of a barrel of heating oil is 135. why would there be such a huge premium for a product that no one is using because it's 70 degrees? it defies logic for anyone to say it's supply and demand to add to your point, representative markey, in the remark she made in your opening statement, for the first time since harry truman was president, the united states has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products. extraordinary. most people think that we are a

net importer of everything. our crude imports are under 50%, we make so much of the refined products that we use that with enough of it to export to foreign markets. and heating oil commodity cost is $3.2 $3.22 in a season with o winter. the price of a gallon of gasoline on the gasoline contract on the nymex has gone up 92 cents between the middle of december and end of march. at a time when americans last year reduce their consumption of gasoline 2.5%, and it reduced it by an amount more than at any time since world war ii, just over the last three years of the economic contraction. if there's anything that underscores what professor greenberger has said today about what the action that you should take in these markets, it is that the fund is a supply and demand do not seem to count. americans have sacrificed. they have sacrificed, and

they're not getting the benefit of it. >> extraordinary. i now recognize the vice chair of our democratic caucus, mr. becerra. >> thank you, madam chair. i join with all my clocks in sync thank you very much for being here. by the way, in california we are paying well more than $4 a gallon for gas, and we're paying upwards of $4.50 and more for regular gasoline in los angeles. gentlemen, we've seen this movie before. and it wasn't very good the first time. we saw it with the so-called enron energy crisis in the early to mid-2000. we sought as you mentioned before with this housing bubble in the late 2000s, and what happened with the wall street meltdown. and so, i think we hear you loud and clear, but they're still

folks out there who are saying no, it's not speculation. no, it's not what you're seeing. so let me give you another chance. is there another explanation for the steep increase in petroleum prices today? is there anyone out there in a world that has some credibility with saying it is something other than speculators? >> there is in many people's financial interest to promulgate which is a logical thing come when people who don't know the markets, you would think if the prices going up like this it must be supplied event. that's what we're all taught in economics 101. we didn't know in economics 1150s markets would be, gambling casinos. and that's what's happened now. there may be some worry about the straits of hormuz. there may be some transportation problems that are causing this, but i will tell you, it didn't go from 147 to 30 accidentally. the house of representatives

passed the bill of 288-33 to stop gambling. senator reid. by the way, you also say we should have finished it in june 2008 the leadership brought a bill to the floor that was introduced that day that passed for hundred two-19 that night extend to read didn't wait in 2008 to go through things. introduced in in his own name a bill that got 51 votes to stop gambling. he couldn't vote cloture but if you can't find, if prices stay that he might have no cloture. that's what -- people were saying the republicans, we will never get their support. i will tell you when gasoline goes up, we've gotten in their support before. >> and let us work on that because i think it's absolutely true that it is almost impossible these days in the house of representatives to get a hearing to have you officially testify to essentially convey what you just announce today.

and that is that it is principally due to speculation. but let me make sure because i don't want to walk away from his hearing and have someone say to me there's some credible folks out there who are saying it's simply supply and demand. is there anyone out there that you know who says that we have a supply problem? we don't have enough production? and other want to go into the dynamics of this and marketing 101. i just want a name. is there anyone i can turn and find out where this person is coming from to say that there's a supply problem? >> i think and honesty which is a their people -- a professor at texas university, i noted professor at the london school of economics year but if you wait, it's like a 60 to two or three. >> is their anyone saying there's a demand problem that which is increase our consumption? you just mentioned we have seen the demand drop. >> absolutely. and to the point, there was a

great story in the news that when i get home i will forward over to you and other members of the committee, where there was a news story, i forget and which of the news service it was, but the department of energy is the one who produces these statistic. the headline was americans reduce gasoline consumption, wall street doesn't believe it. so at some point i guess you could have a debate with someone about whether the statistics are right or wrong, but the fact of the matter is, and i think this is borne out by whether it is a mastercard figures on credit card purchases or whether it is the department of energy are what even the american petroleum institute on prices of gasoline. americans have decreased their consumption of gasoline. so it is not a demand problem. there may be areas in the country where there are dislocations of product from time to time. there's no questions about the. >> let me ask one last question. by the way, mr. guilford, i was interested to see her background. you are not coming from some

left wing think tank. if i understand this quickly usurped under president reagan for time, did you not? >> that's right. not withstand that i really appreciate you letting me in the room today. [laughter] >> we thank you for being here for your testimony. last question. so who the heck is pocketing this 10 billion-dollar a month that americans are having to pay for overpriced gasoline? where is it going? >> in the quarterly reports you will learn the information i think because there's a question that the profitability of those who refined gasoline and to market it throughout the country are going to be benefiting from this. there's no question about that. everyone knows that. also, those who are making these investments in these ghastly contracts also profiting rather handsomely, and i think if you pay very close attention to what goes on between wall street and the physical markets, and i think this is an incredibly important thing for the commission to be paying

attention to because it's not all about the commodities are, it's about the relationship and how one drive the other. you will find the american people are paying a very hefty bill for what's going on. >> thank you both for testimony. >> is also wall street. wall street is getting -- this is how they make their money. there are two things that are getting them into record. one is the so-called poker rule, which means they can't treat these contracts for the own book. they have to have an intermediate. and the fed, interested in of who is clearly learned their lesson from 2008 meltdown, is telling these things get out of selling commodities. get out of commodities. you are not buying oil. you're not selling oil. highly with regard to the physical markets, in 2008 the largest holder of heating oil paintings was morgan stanley but if you can drive the price up to the futures market you want to buy the physical and you're not going to want to sell the

physical because it's like an appreciating asset. why let the american consumer have the? let's keep it until we hit the bubble. >> thank you both. that's correct. largest supply of heating oil was morgan stanley. it's not in the country. so even though some of you may like to talk about big oil, it's actually take wall street that's controlling most of our heating oil. >> revelation after revelation. with that, let me ask for questioning of my colleague from massachusetts who is the recommend on the natural resources committee, mr. markey. >> thank you, madam chair. you have climate change come a new english temperatures in the winter are now four degrees warmer than they were in 1970. we now philadelphia's weather from 1970. opening day for the red sox are now planning on which short sleeved shirt they're going to wear rather than which combination of sweaters, flannel shirts they will wear which is a

big change from past years. but it reflects this downward pressure on home heating oil, but let's be honest, okay? the price of home heating oil to somehow or another was unaffected by the market. this winter. people in new england and all across the country just got just upside down by morgan stanley. so let's go to what's happened in this market since 2002. we had dennis from better markets testified before the natural resources committee two weeks ago. here's what he told us. that in 2002, 11% of this oil market was controlled by speculators, and 89% controlled by airlines, trucking firms, shippers, who had to basically place bets to protect themselves. now in 2012, it's 63% are speculators, but only 37% are truckers and shippers and

airlines. putting them at the mercy of morgan stanley in terms of ensuring that this oil product is sold and that the laws of supply and demand in fact is abided by. is this the heart of the issue right here, that the people who are now owning these oil products have no stake in ensuring that the price goes anywhere up and they will hold it because the number of fiscal transfer, they just hold it is all it is for them is cash. you agree with that? is that what held new england hostage this winter and people all across the country? >> i agree with that absolute. under any supply and demand scenario, representative markey, given the weather we had at home and just parenthetically since i'm a red sox fan, we are worried about who's going to be pitching, not the close we are in. [laughter] but back to morgan stanley for second. [inaudible]

>> opening against detroit. >> i didn't mean to start a major league baseball or. -- baseball war. to the point of anyone's rational concept, anyone's rational concept of supply and demand, when you have a one-third, one-third decrease in a demand for your product, and supply is adequate for the market based on in punitive demand, it defies imagination that anyone who ever took an e. can't wonder one class would look at that circumstance and say that the price she do anything other than go down. you don't have to be dick tracy to figure out why wall street is taking the cftc and all the dodd-frank rules to court. they want to stop putting a cop on the beat. they would make sure these regulations are not there so they can corner the market and

create artificial volatility in the market. so that's the easy connection. morgan stanley controls the market, they can go to court to make sure that one, wall street regulations, that is that dodd-frank but on the books are not implemented. and they say to the republicans in congress, don't put the $109 worth of extra cops of extra cops on the beat to go out and scare the living daylights out of these scam artist. pretty simple. you could summarize this, you know, nefarious activity and that simple form. let me go to a couple pieces of information that came out actually today. one according to the energy information agency, the united states crude oil inventories increased 16 million barrels over the last two weeks. inventory of oil and the united states went up 16 million barrels in the last two weeks with the price of a gallon of gasoline went up 7 cents a gallon. this seems to be a little disconnected there in the

market. and this morning the department of energy announced that u.s. crude oil production last week rose 228,000 barrels per day, to 6 million barrels per day altogether, the highest oil production since 1998. so you have those two, higher production, more oil in reserve and the price of gasoline went up 7 cents over the last two weeks. so why would that happen, unless morgan stanley and the other scam artists are out there trying to maneuver the market to keep high so they can read more profit at the expense of our economy, and at the expense of ordinary consumers. do you agree with that summary? >> yes, i do. >> professor? >> absolutely. >> let me then, let me then, professor, let me go through this litany that you want us to go through. one, you want the $100 million

for the cftc, and you want to make sure that the republicans can't cut $30 million from the cftc budget so the cops are on to become is that right? >> that's right. i would add a footnote, because you are also proposing a transaction tax. the fed does not come to you every year and asked for money. they get money from the banks. cftc should have frankly 100 million is the limit. it should be -- but there's a 100 million different in what they're getting and what president obama gets him. >> they're getting 205. they need to get 308. >> my view is they should get 408. they need cops on the beat. 303 is already -- >> $109. tramplers talk about the consumer being billed $10 billion because there's no cops on the. >> professor, if you could, if you want the justice department to begin the investigation and

you think will have an immediate impact on the market, that's very important. and on the question of banning specific investment vehicles, mainly because you want a band right now. >> commodity index swaps, synthetic exchange traded funds,. >> how much money do you think that will take out of the market? >> probably at least half a trillion dollars. >> that's the gambling money that is in a system that you take that out and we'll see the drop in oil prices and home heating oil prices. >> any of those three things that will be a draw. but three of them together you will cut the snake, the head of the snake off forever. >> you agree with that? >> yes. >> will have the impact almost anybody? >> absolutely. >> mr. barton? >> listen, i just want to thank our witnesses, and this has been extraordinary informative. it was good to hear you again, professor. >> thank you. >> i have the benefit of the wisdom and the knowledge of mr.

guilford but i want to specially thank you. there's a tendency in hearings like this, not to bring it down to how it really impacts a mother of two, and i especially, mr. guilford, thank you for that scenario. is those compelling stories that bring home the issue to everyday americans in terms of both where the profit is and the impact that this has, and in how we go about doing it. the case of home heating oil as well with prices as noted in new england and, you know, record low to see no change, in fact is he the price of home heating oil for consumers go. this is what it's all about at the end of the day. we can't thank you enough for your testimony. and also for backing up what we think is an important agenda to accomplish in the united states congress. >> thank you, mr. larson.

with quick answers if i can because we're coming to the 3:30 mark. professor greenberger, you start to allude to this. every president since ronald reagan has repose offsetting the cost of the cftc operation with a collection of user fee. we have legislation that is out there at the moment to authorize that. a question for you, quick answer, professor greenberger and mr. guilford. would a small user fee impose any real burden on market participants? >> the market, cftc's market is increase from a 42 in dollars market to 320-dollar notion value market but if you took a little bit of that, would not be noticed at all, but wall street will not give an inch on that. even if it's a nickel they don't want to give the american consumer a nickel.

>> so it would not be a burden on -- >> talking about a couple of pennies per transaction. that's almost infinitesimal it's so small because there's such a large number of transactions. >> but that would alleviate the problem in terms of the funding and that would be beyond the appropriation that we deal with. but it would alleviate the funding problem for the ctc did able to do their job. mr. greenberger, quickly, to current market conditions warrant the use of cftc's current emergency authority to set margin and position limits to curb excessive legislation in the oil market? >> yes, but remember that cftc, which is heroic in its efforts, is being starved to death. go to the head -- that's why the president was so smart, got an interagency task force, give the fbi married with the brains of a start agency.

so that would be my answer. >> and that's the authority they have had -- >> but they are understaffed as you know. i would like to get more direct and hit it harder. >> quickly, relief to consumers once the definition of a swap is finalized, what concern to you both have with regards to the lawsuit filed to prevent the rule of? >> i'm very worried the lawsuit is going to kill whatever dodd-frank did. dodd-frank set the ship right. the hearing, those who attended, i didn't but i heard from people i respect who did, did not go well and was in front of a judge who probably will be objective but as you know the d.c. circuit has already. >> with that, and i'm going to turn this over to the leader for a close. i want to akamai college. i want to thank my colleagues

for their time and the question, particularly thank you for what has been an unbelievable we feeling hearing on what i very, very technical issues. allowing, i'll speak for myself, to understand clearly what is going on. i wish we could take you on the road and let the american people hear from you about what is going on. i think it would be critical to do that. i thank you for that, for the clarity, for the candor, and for your commitment to the american public and the american consumer at an unbelievably disastrous time economically in their lives. they are really, they are on life support, and addressing this issue is crucial to the economic well being. many, many thanks for your contribution today. madam leader spent a few madam chair. i want to thank you for bringing us together, to you and chairman

larson for bringing forth these excellent witnesses to shed light on an issue of great significance to all of the american people. all of our members, as i said to you earlier, when we are out of session and so many members are present for hearing, speaks to the urgency of the matter and the expectation of experts that we have from all of you, which will certainly realize. when i began my remarks i talked about the agony and ecstasy. the agni being the consumer at the pump and ecstasy being the oil companies. but it is clear recognizing they made $137 billion in profit last year, $261,000 a minute, but it's clear that some of the ecstasy is shared by speculators, excessive speculators from wall street. this is a very big deal, and

when it was injected that may be about the nickel and maybe it's about the money, but i think it's more about they don't want the supervision of the additional money will bring. but this is a very valuable hearing. again, i wish would be the full house of representatives in a bipartisan way would have such a hearing, listen to what you have to say. the answers that you are supplying to us, the documentation of the challenge that we have. but having said that, i am pleased this is a matter of public record that you stand to be an intellectual resource to us on this issue to the congress on this issue, and the range of opinion from dr. greenberger in his academic world, and mr. guilford his or the reagan administration in more than one capacity. so the validity that you bring to it is wide-ranging, and we

are most grateful. again, i thank my colleagues and distinguished ranking member on the natural resources committee. he has spoken so highly of what your testimony would be. again, thank you. and thank you again, congresswoman delauro for your leadership. >> thank you. and a hearing is adjourned. [inaudible conversations] >> with the u.s. senate on per a

this weekend and next we're featuring booktv in prime time here on c-span2. tonight, this year savannah book festival started at 8 p.m. eastern. >> this year's student cam competition asked students across the country what part of the constitution was important to them, and why. today's third prizewinner chose the second amendment. >> an increasingly controversial topic in the united states today is gun control.

this has stemmed from the second amendment, the right to bear arms. >> the second amendment of the constitution was created to protect the people in case the government became too powerful, the people would have the opportunity to strike down an oppressive government. >> this provision of the constitution provided by 1791, the right to bear arms is so important, include the first ten amendments of our nation. >> was placed as part as a marker of the possibility of what has to be admitted is the violent overthrow of an oppressive government. >> behind the words of this seemingly simple statement, the right to bear arms, lies hundreds of years of complex arguments ranging from all different perspectives. >> how do you define the right to bear arms? >> how many guns should you be able to have? >> how difficult should it be to get a gun? >> isn't the second amendment a

>> the majority of our pro-gun factions consist mostly of conservative groups. one such interest group is the nra. the national rifle association. >> when the authorities can't protect you, they've got no business and no authority trying to deny you the right to protect yourself. >> in defense of pro-gun advocates, respective founding fathers had much to say. >> i ask, sir, what is the militia? it is the whole people. to disarm the people is the best and most essential way to enslave them. >> the best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. >> firearms stand next to importance to the constitution itself.

they are the american people's liberty. >> an armed man is a citizen. a disarmed man is a subject. >> despite all the shootings that have occurred worldwide, such as the one at virginia tech university in blacksburg, virginia, which killed 32 innocent students, some people still hold fast to their beliefs. here's the opinion of a virginia tech student himself. >> yes, i do believe it is an individual right. the second amendment states that people have the right to bear arms, which basically means that any human being or any citizen of the united states is allowed to have a firearm. >> no, they have not. i was actually there for the second shooting that recently took place, and no, they haven't altered my opinion at all. in fact, it might have made my

opinion stronger on the fact that i think people should have firearms. i think it's a good idea to own a firearm, and also i think that many colleges should look into allowing concealed weapons on campus. >> basically i think that if i f people are allowed to have concealed weapons on campuses, those people who are following the law most likely are just doing it for protection. so i think that that will enter into the minds of people who are going to be hostile. so if they're entering a classroom or if they're entering a building and they are thinking, you know, i want to bring in a gun and shoot someone in here, they may think twice about it because they may know of someone else in here may have a gun for protection. >> pro-gun activist groups are very diverse. they are made up of hunters, gun collectors, conservatives and even some liberals.

but there's a whole nother side to this argument, and that is the anti-gun rights movement. >> december 6, 1989, in canada a man wanting to exact revenge on feminists kills 14 young women at a college in montréal, and then commits suicide. >> march 13, 1996, 16 children and their teacher were gunned down in scotland. the killer committed suicide. >> april 28, 1996, in australia a gunman kills 35 at port arthur on the island of tasmania. >> april 20, 1999, in the united states, two high school students go on a rampage at columbine high school killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide. >> april 3, 2009, in the united states a man runs amok at a welcome center in new york, killing 13. >> on april 16, 2007, a student originally from korea kills 32 people at virginia tech

university, blacksburg, virginia. >> shootings like these and many others have served a huge role in the ongoing gun control debate. anti-gun organizations point out these shootings as acts of violence that occurred strictly because guns are easily accessible. paul helmke is the president of one of the largest anti-gun organizations in america. the brady campaign to prevent gun violence. their mission statement is this, we are devoted to creating an america free from gun violence, where all americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in our communities. in michael moore's film, "bowling for columbine," he searches for the truths behind the notorious columbine shootings. in it he asks, why not use gandhi's way? he didn't have guns and he beat the british empire. we have shown you one virginia

tech student who is pro-gun before the shootings and after the shootings. here's another student from the same school with a different opinion entirely. >> no, i don't think the second amendment is necessary. i feel like back when it was created in the bill of rights, like state militias were needed to fight off the federal government if they got out of hand, and also to like just to protect themselves personally. and nowadays there's no need for that. there's no state militias or anything, except for hunting there's no real reason, if guns were illegal nobody would need to protect themselves from guns. >> yes. i'd say before the tech shootings i was wavering, kind of. i didn't really have too strong

of an opinion, but after seeing the possibilities somebody could have of harming 70 people, it just makes more sense to make it illegal for citizens to have their own weapons. but i think that if the criminal was unable to obtain a handgun or any kind of weapon, then there would be no reason for anybody else to have one. >> we have shown you the varying viewpoints about gun control. >> now it's time for you to decide. >> to bear arms or not to bear arms, that's the question. >> luckily, we live in a nation where we are entitled to our own opinions. >> so get educated, pick a side. >> and get out there and express yourselves. >> thanks for watching. >> go to studentcam.org to watch all the winning videos, and continue the conversation about today's documentary at our facebook and twitter pages.

>> this saturday at an eastern on c-span2's booktv, join our live call-in program with this in which former navy s.e.a.l. and author chris kyle. >> if you think of yourself as a family and if you think of yourself as a team, she said when i get a raise at work is so proud of me and it's like we got a raise, our family got a raise. but i really felt as though she had redefined providing to include what her husband does and as you a lot of respect for what her husband was doing. >> "the richer sex" author liz mundy on the changing role of women as the breadwinners of the family and how that impacts their lives. also this weekend, america the beautiful, director pediatric nursery at johns hopkins been cars and compares the decline of empires past with america. shares his thoughts on what should be done to avoid a

similar fate. sunday at 3:30 p.m. booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> this sunday on c-span's q&a, the u.s. senate youth program. >> one of the greatest experiences of this week was when i got the opportunity to meet both of my senators. bob casey and pat toomey. just wanted to meet them and talk with him. >> some of the leaders like leon panetta, he talks about how important it is to be financially sound. if we are not, devoting money to national defense is going to be worthless because we will not have any money to devote to it. >> high school students from all 50 states who participate in a weeklong program at the nation's capital share their observations and experiences as they interact with members of congress, the supreme court and the president. >> they said there's a lot of bipartisanship going on in congress and i'm the one reaching across the aisle. everybody we have met here from congress, it makes me wonder if everybody is saying thatcome but it's not actually happening.

if there is discrepancy between what they're saying and what they're actually doing. i never thought about that before it came to. >> sunday night at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span's q&a. >> distracted driving was the cause of 3000 highway deaths in 2010. many states have stricter laws. the issue was examined recent by the national transportation safety board to ntsb chairman deborah hersman gave introductory remarks. she was followed by discussion on the types of distractions inside a car and effects on drivers. this is an hour and 40 minutes. >> good morning. welcome to the boardroom of the national transportation safety board. i am deborah hersman and is my privilege to serve as the chairman of the ntsb. today i'm joined by my colleagues, vice chairman, board member robert sumwalt, mark

rosekind and earl weener. will you please turn your attention to the video screen. >> the date was may 18, 2008. it was my college graduation morning. everything i had always worked for. you don't realize is right around the corner. i was so excited to really finally be starting life. i had is easy our have tried to get home. i got about halfway home, and we came to greenlight. we're going south, 45 balls and our, a really easy road. we came to this greenlight. the same time an 18 wheeler came to the greenlight opposite of the and at the same time there was an 18 year-old young man on

the intersecting road who came to a red light but he was just talking on his phone. never even saw the red light. he turned left and the tractor-trailer serve to try to miss him and hit our car head on. both my parents were killed. they were pronounced dead on the scene. i was on the brink of death, and remained that way for months. my parents were such wonderful people. always trying to do good for the world, helping soup kitchens, helping boy scouts earn their merit badges. always busy trying to do something to make the world a little better place. my injuries were immense. i had two broken feet, a broken wrist, a broken collarbone, broken kitty, broken fibula, shattered pelvis, lacerated liver, partially collapsed lung, crushed arteries and to

traumatic brain injury. i was given, i believe the neurologist gave me a 10% chance of surviving. i kept hanging on. there was no real explanation for what brought me to, but i just kept beating all the odds. >> that story, along with so many other tragedies, lives cut short, lives forever changed, that's why we're here today. it's time to address how to modify attitudes, change behaviors, and save lives. today, we're joined by experts as well as leading highway safety advocates. we also have exhibitors out in the hallway showcasing how they are fighting distracted driving. but perhaps most poignantly, are

the victims and the family members who are here. .. [applause] >> another person in the audience who has been working for years to make a

difference is champion race car driver andy pilgrim. he has been focusing on teen driver safety for more than 15 years. as many of you know car accidents are the biggest killers of, are the biggest killer of teens on our roadways. andy's message has been, pay attention at all times while driving. his public service announcements, which are outstanding are going to be shown during the breaks and there are copies available in the lobby. andy, will you please stand and be recognized. [applause] and look at chapel hill, north carolina. yesterday their town council passed a complete cell phone ban. hands-free and handheld. advocates christa slow and joe kapowski who have worked

so tirelessly to achieve this ban are here with us today. congratulations to you both and to chapel hill. will you all please stand. [applause] it is truly these individual and collective actions that are going to change behaviors and attitudes when it comes to cell phone use and texting behind the wheel. at the ntsb we've seen distracted operations on our nation's railways, airways, waterways, and most commonly on our highways. 10 years ago we investigated an accident where a young driver was talking on her cell phone. her car crossed the highway median, flipped over, and landed on a minivan. that conversation ended in five fatalities. just last year we completed

an investigation involving a commercial truck driver. he was on his phone. he crossed the median, overrode a barrier, struck a van, killing himself and 10 others. then in december, the board met on a multivehicle crash caused by a teen who sent an received 11 text messages in the 11 minutes before the fatal accident. after a decade of issuing recommendations about distraction in december we issued our boldest recommendation yet. we called for a nationwide ban on the use of portable electronic devices while driving. as you all know that recommendation struck a chord as it should. we ignited a national dialogue and heard from citizens across the country. some of them said the ntsb

sure has a lot of nerve. there goes intrusive government again. but others applauded us for taking such a strong stand. we received letters, e-mails, phone calls, and even some original public service announcements. one man even sent us a song that he had composed called, shut up and drive. yes, our nation is truly at the intersection of mobility and connectivity. mobility because americans are always on the move. we have millions of people driving billions of miles every day. and connectivity. just look at the growing market share of electronic devices. there are more wireless accounts than there are people in the united states.

so if you all in the audience will help me out here, please raise your hand if you have one or more blackberries, cell phones, smartphones, or other devices? as you can see, these devices are pervasive. they're in our offices, in our homes, our schools and in our cars with fatal consequences. people want to be connected anywhere, anytime, anyhow. whether it's hands-free or handheld. touching the dashboard or waving at the windshield, it can be distracting. and further what we know there are multiple kinds of distraction. visual, oral, manual, and cognitive. we have got to dispel the

myth of multitasking. we are still learning what the human brain can and can not handle. but what is the price of our desire to be mobile, and connected at the same time? just ask jacy good, alan andres and many others that are with us here today. they can tell you the price is just too high. can any message, any text, or any call be worth someone's life? as we gather on the eve of national distracted driving awareness month, it is time to ask what it's going to take to move from awareness, to action? it's clear that we don't need another decade of investigations and recommendations. it's clear that we need to

determine what we can do, individually, and collectively, to stop the deadlyness of distraction, and it's clear that we need to act now. too much is at stake. let's listen, learn, and identify specific steps to put attention back in the driver's seat. to improve safety, and most importantly, to save lives. i look forward to an informative and provocative discussion here today as we hear from our experts, and i would like to turn the podium over to dr. deb bruce. she and her team have done an outstanding job putting this event together and i would ask you to please introduce our first panel, dr. bruce. >> chairman hersman and members of the board, our first panel this morning will introduce a broad range of distractions that come pete for drivers attention. panelists have been asked to

discuss the categories applied to driver distraction and discuss the findings of distracted driver research, experimental and naturalistic. there are four panelists on the first panel. as i introduce each they will provide some brief opening remarks. our first presenter this morning will be dr. jeff care from the university of calvary. he is the director of the cognitive ergonomics research lab bother and he directs the university of calgary driving simulator center. he co-leads the teen and novice drive network which is part of canada's national research initiative for automotive research and development. dr. care, i invite your presentation. >> thank you. i'd like to introduce a number of themes with respect to research on driver distraction. first of all, as you see in the picture before you times square. now times square contains many, many, many distractions and it's very interesting to look around but as you see somebody is

on their cell phone, somebody is looking up at the billboards. that is one of the first themes i would like to introduced. there are many types of distractions. secondly, what is the contribution of distraction to u.s. traffic fatalities? first of all, it's increases from 1999 to 2008, it increased from 10.9% to the 15.8% of the total fatalities in the united states. secondly, we know that driver distraction from texting is a large problem. one of the analysis predicts that texting has increased the number of fatalities agreat deal across that same time period. another theme i like to introduce, if you see the big v or w or however you want to see the particular figure, the data varies but one. themes i'd like to bring forward is that there's

convergant evidence in much of the research that's out there. meaning if you look across the types of studies distraction and the negative effects of it tend to accumulate whether you're looking at it, there are a number of different types of epidemiology, natural observations of the car study. driving simulators who the expert panel is quite familiar with. there is converge ant across studies. secondly there's not a definitive method per se that gives answers to all the driver distraction questions. south is often important to look across all the different types of methods to see what they all say. again, they tend to be converge ant indicating. many of those distractions are outside the vehicle. the first line and this is a,

particularly set of data from jane stutz. she has looked at it from a number of points ever view. adjusting music, looking at interacting with other occupants and lower on down you see a much smaller proportion, talking and listening to the cell phone which appears to be growing in this particular data set. again if you look across the two time periods you see some variance in the two data sets which indicates it is not particularly stable data because you have a general indication of the overall contributions of many different types of distractions. why does cell phone conversation or other in vehicle tasks affect driver performance? we did a meta analysis that included 20 six studies and we find that in general, conversation increases responses to hazard and events by a quarter second.

other things like, do people decrease their speed when they're engaged in a conversation? no, not necessarily across the studies. they increase their following distance or headway? no, not necessarily. many people argue that there's a compensation that occurs. that tends not to be the case. lane-keeping, do you stay in your lane, is list effected by being in a conversation. do the eye movements change? yes they do, but there is problems with combining across a number of studies. and do people miss things? there is insufficient data on that but many individual studies that found you can miss things all together like traffic lights and so forth. and there's a number of slides that are missing but i'm not sure where they went to, so thank you. >> thank you, dr. caird.

our second presenter will be don fisher from the university of massachusetts am hurst. professor fisher is the head of the department of mechanical and industrial engineering as well as director of the insurance human performance lab bother. in addition dr. fisher pioneered the development of pc-based hazard and patient training and attention maintenance training to improve novice drivers ability to anticipate hazards while driving. dr. fisher, i invite your presentation. >> thank you, dr. bruce. there are a number of categories, different categories of distractions. the last slide, one jeff actually didn't have he would have spoken briefly about the engineering enforcement and education remedies that the transportation community can take in order to reduce the dangers that distracted driving pretend to the motoring public. many of you already know we have number of engineering,

enforcement and education remedies we can take. however it is the case that the sources of distraction seem almost to be limitless. unless we can define some, some finite number of categories we're going to have almost a limitless number of remedies. fortunately, fortunately, from the standpoint of behaviors that affect the safe operation of the vehicle there are roughly five categories of distraction. those categories depend whether the driver's either on the road, off the road and if off the road, whether they are inside the vehicle or outside the vehicle. so five categories of distraction. category 1 distractions are just those distractions where you're taking a single glance inside the vehicle. category 2 distractions. those distractions where you're alternating glances inside and outside the vehicle and so on and so forth as you can see in that slide. let's start by considering the engineering remedies across the five possible types of distractions.

to begin i want to consider categories one through four. in categories one through four the engineering remedies are targeted at making sure that drivers are alternating short, safe, glances inside the vehicle or to the side of the vehicle with sufficiently long glances on the forward roadway. sufficiently long enough to anticipate hazards. most us in the, engineering and transportation communities know agree we should limit the glances off the forward roadway during a single glance to no more than two seconds. however we are still not sure when a driver is alternating glances on and off the forward roadway how long the glance has to be on the forward roadway in order to anticipate a hazard. note that this means when of our new in-vehicle systems where the drivers are alternating glances on and off the forward roadway are not necessarily safe because

we don't know yet how long the driver needs to glance on the forward roadway in order to remain safe. in category, category 5, that last category, conversing we try to monitor driver state and fatigue and professor john lee will talk about some of those. let's next consider some of the enforcement strategies across the five categories. in fact there have been really only two. category 2, enforcement strategies such as texting and category 5 enforcement strategies such as hands-free, bans on hand-held cell phones and ntsb ban on cell phones all together. in the future we'll see a major discussion of certainly bans on cell phones in work zones and school zones. finally let me consider the education remedies we might take across the various different categories. i want to begin by saying

that novice drivers are much, much, much more likely to be distracted than are experienced drivers. and, as evidence for this, we have, in one study, evaluated drivers glances inside the vehicle, both comparing novice and experienced drivers. and we find, for example, when the drivers are trying to take, get change for an exact tollbooth, that novice drivers, that is the bar on the right in the slide, novice drivers are some 16 times more likely to take a dangerous glance inside the vehicle than are experienced drivers. 16 times more likely to take a dangerous glance inside the vehicle. we've also looked at novice and experienced drivers when they're glancing outside the veeb. we find that when novice drivers are trying to anticipate hazards, there are some six times less likely. the bar on the left is six times lower than the bar on

the right. some six times less likely to anticipate hazards than are experienced drivers. there is some good news with respect to training programs designed to remediate the dangers of distracted driving. we evaluated and developed training programs for category 1 and category 2 distractions that reduce the frequency of especially long glances and we've developed and evaluated novice driving training programs that increase the likelihood that novice drivers will anticipate hazards up to a year after training. in short there are three takeaway messages. first, we really don't know whether in-vehicle systems are safe which are requiring drivers to alternate their glances off and on the road because we don't know how long you need to stay focused on the road in order to anticipate a hazard. second, in terms of enforcement i think we ought to quickly move to ban cell phones in work zones and

school zones. third i think the evidence is very strong novice driving training programs especially immerse sieve in the environment can have a positive effect on the behaviors causing crashes. thank you for your attention. >> thank you, dr. fisher. our third presenter will be dr. john lee from the university of wisconsin-madison. dr. lee is the emerson electric professor at department of industrial and systems engineering at the university of wisconsin-madison and director of the cognitive systems lacktory. dr. lee's research focuses on safety and the acceptance of complex human machine systems in considering, and he considers how technology mediates attention. dr. lee, i invite your presentation. >> thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to be part of this discussion. i'd like to start with at anecdote about a trip that took, about a month ago,

february 13th. i was returning to madison. and, i was, go ahead? i was approaching madison on a divided highway that was transitioning in a suburban arterial. and i looked down to change the radio. i looked down to skoal through a list of songs that had been read into my car's computer from a cd. wanting to avoid the adelle songs my wife had stored there i searched for songs by bruce springsteen. looking through the list, springsteen, adell, springsteen adell, i looked back to the road. no looming crash. no imminent death. nothing untoward. nothing but the feeling that i had looked away from the road for much, much too long.

i was really lucky. i think i may have looked away from the road for three, four, five seconds. dangerously long. there, this experience i think provides some important lessons that are typical of the more general trend regarding driver distraction that i think are worth thinking about. first, despite a strong commitment to driving safety, i was see us doed -- seduced in the moment by technology. i never talk on my cell phone, hands-free, handheld, in the car and yet was inadvertently distracted, tempted to do something much more distracting. s second, although some of these vehicle entertainment systems seem like old technology, just seem like the radio, it isn't. it's very different. so the surface similarities

belie sound differences that make something seem familiar and safe but it may not be. third, education is not sufficient. despite publishing a paper on the dangers of scrolling through a list of songs while driving, i failed to adjust my own behavior. that paper is cited, published in the same month that i had this event. so a sad irony there. the danger, i think of distraction comes from the huge proliferation of new types of distraction. hundreds of thousands of smartphones apps have been developed. i think at last count there are over 500,000 apps for the iphone alone and many of those are designed to be used while driving. and some are designed, i think, expressly not to be used while driving but drivers do anyway. the pace of change is

daunting. the pace of change far outstrips of the pace of regulatory response which i think is a major problem. a recent news release highlights this challenge. intel has pledged $100 million fund that will, quote, give consumers what they want. uninhibited access to the internet and news, entertainment and social media while driving. so i think that is just an indication of the pace of change. some of this technology is entertainment and directly distracted from the act of driving. some of the technology shown here in this futuristic vision of driving from "wired" magazine maywell -- actually direct drivers to driving related information and can distractly the head up display showing speedometer might at the same time mask other

important information on the roadway. so just as entertainment can distract driving related information, can also distract and i think this is a growing issue as cars are changing dramatically, moving from cars as we normally think about them to computers on the road. 200 million lines of code in a modern vehicle just in the navigation system. so dramatically complex cars that are changing the nature of driving. so what's to be done? one approach is to use attentive cars that help direct drivers attention to events of interest in the moment but also provide feedback to help drivers understand the dangers that risks they're taking. so to conclude i think some of the important issues for us to consider are first, that there's a plethora of new distracts entering the car. second these new distractions bring

dramaticly new capacity to distract the driver. the increasing computerization of the car brings the potential for the car itself to distract the driver through collision warnings that might be given to the driver and the second to last point there, is the that this rapid pace of technology change outstrips the ability i think in many cases for policy to keep up and attempt tiff cars may be an answer to compliment regulations, public awareness and training. so thank you for your attention. >> thank you, dr. lee. our fourth presenter for this panel will be dr. anne mccart insurance institute for highway safety. dr. mccart worked in the highway safety field for 20 years and alcohol impaired driving, large truck safety, young drivers, side airbag effectiveness and occupant

restraints. dr. mccartt, i invite your presentation. >> i would like to thank the board for inviting me here today to speak. there's really no study or a single study approach that is going to tell us all the things that we would like to know about the problem of distracted driving and i would like to use the research on cell phones to illustrate this point. so there's ample evidence that many drivers talk on phones when they're driving. this slide shows, summarizes surveys conducted by the federal government over the last few years. if you look at the gold line, that indicates at any given time of day about 5% of drivers are talking on handheld phones while they're sitting at intersections. the blue line incorporates an estimated 4% additional drivers who are talking on hand-free phones. we know a lot more about the use of handheld devices, talking on handheld devices.

we know a lot less about the use of hand free devices. there are also large gaps in our knowledge about different driving situations. for example we know little about phone use at night, on busy high-speed roads or rural roads. most studies have been experimental studies. these are able to isolate very precisely the effects on driving performance of specific phone tasks and pretty much all of them have the found that there are debt triments to driving performance with either handheld or hands free phone tasks. the limitations these are small volunteer samples that the driving and the phone tasks are controlled by the researcher, not the driver. so it is unknown whether the findings generalize to drivers using their own phones in their own vehicles. naturalistic driving studies have the advantage they're looking at real world driving so they can document

very precisely exactly what observeable distractions of drivers are present. the biggest limitations to these studies to date there has been very few crashes in their samples. so if you look at 100 car study of passenger vehicles for example, there are about 500 crashes and near-crashes. only about 50 were crashes. in a study of commercial vehicle drivers where there were 3600 safety-relevant events, only 10 were at-fault crashes and about 112 were at-fault near-crashes. let me read this. might seem that a logical place to study distraction would be to look at police crash reports. unfortunately it is just a reality that distraction is not reliably reported by police. this slide summarizes the percent of deaths involving driver distraction. this is based on the

fatality analysis reporting system. the red line shows the national percentage. these other lines show four states. and the, a couple of points this slide makes. if you focus for example, on the purple line which is maryland at the top, that green line is florida, what you see when you look across the states very large differences across the states and also you have somewhat you might call a nominally -- a mom lease, when you look year to year within a state. there have been two studies that have been able to verify phone use for crash-involved drivers. these use cell phone company billing records. these were the strong study designs that accounted for many driver factors but these studies also have some potential limitations. one is that the phone, that the driving situation when the crash occurred may have not been the same as the driving situation in the

control period. these were all crash-involved drivers. so the risk of their using phones might not generalize to noncrash-involved drivers. certain aspects of the study also relied on drivers recalling events. so i think one of the things that we understand the least is how, what we know from all these different studies about the risk of talking on phones, how that translates into trends in crashes. this is the trends in police reporting crashes. you see a similar trend when you look at fatal crashes. if you look, for example, at the studies where cell phone use was verified, there was a four-fold increase in the risk of crashing when a driver was on the phone. if you look at estimates that run from seven to 10% of drivers on the phone, during their driving time, and you put these things together, you would expect 25% of police reported crashes approximately to involve distraction.

so many of us are puzzled by the fact that we don't seem to be seeing a very large number of crashes showing up when we look at trend due to talking on phones. and then finally just one last comment. i think to some extent there are a lot of things that we'll really never understand about distraction and the effect that it has on crashes but there are new technologies. crash avoidance technology in vehicles that may help prevent crashes that occur due to distraction, fatigue and other kinds of inattention. we may be able to solve a lot of the problem without fulling understanding it. thank you. >> thank you. chairman hersman, that concludes the introductions and opening remarks. panelists i want to recognize your adherence to the tight schedule. i and the board are well aware how difficult it is to follow the clock. i turn the panel back over to you and the board for

questioning. >> thank you, dr. bruce. dr. caird i know we may have had some challenges. did you have another slide you wanted to show? >> sure that would be great. >> >> thank you. the last slide was a more comprehensive list of all current and potentially future ways of mitigating driver distraction and throughout today many of these will be addressed. but i wanted to put it on a single list if you will. maybe pick off the last one. what is a social norm? some may scratch their head. this is not unlike in drink driving or alcohol that you actually make your friends conform to the social norm. under no circumstances should you drive and be

distracted at the same time. social norm takes a very long time to permeate and transmit through society but that's one of the things of many others we should be working on. with that i would like to close. thank you for that opportunity. >> thank you very much. we'll turn the first questions over to member sumwalt. >> good morning. i want to thank all of the pan nellists not just this panel but all you have you who have come. this is very important topic pic as all the issues the ntsb looks at this one is we said many times is the growing problem of distractions in transportation is going to be an epidemic. i thank you all for being here. i realize distractions come in all forms and fashions. we've got kids in the back seat. we've got billboards. we've got electronic devices. we've got all kinds of things going on but the question i want to talk about are those related to

cell phones and texting and dr. mccartt, do you have figures on how much, how much greater the likelihood of being in an accident is as a result of being on a cell phone from not being on a cell phone? >> well, i think still the strongest study looking at the crash risk of being on the phone are the two studies i described that were able to verify phone issues using cell phone billing record for drivers involved in crashes. both of these studies found that the risk of either a property damage-only crash or injury crash was increased by fourfold when drivers were on the phone. both studies also found that the risk was similar whether the phone was handheld or hands-free. the only thing i think we weren't able to look at in terms of hands-free phones,

we weren't able to separate out the difficult kinds. so for example, we couldn't quantify the risk of crashing with a fully hands-free phone. >> thank you. and i think there's a lot of good information right there. your risk of the data are showing that there's about a four times increase likelihood of being in an accident if you're on a cell phone. and that's one point. the other point is, and the big point is, there is, the data do not show any difference between hands-free and hands, and handheld. is that correct? >> that's correct. and in that study i would also say i think the large majority of experimental studies have found similar things. there may be some differences in terms of, there might be an added risk for manipulating a phone, dialing handheld phone. but, i think, pretty much

across the board for experimental studies there is some detriment in esh is did measures of driving performance associated with different kinds of cell phone tasks. >> there are a couple of points i really want to make out of this forum. that issue there is no difference between hands held and hands free. that is a point i think is huge. after we made our recommendations in december, we were unfortunate we pick up the newspaper, see what other people are saying, high-ranging government officials that ought to know better that saying that we missed the mark on that. that hands-free is okay but your data are not showing that, correct? i want to really drive this point home. >> that is what we found. i should say, i mentioned the naturalistic studies. they, they have the limitation that they don't

have a lot of crashes in their samples but their findings did diverge. they found that dialing or texting had an increased risk of a safety relevant event. they did not find a significant risk to talking on a handheld phone. trying to, want to say something, hopefully i can do it simply. when they -- sorry. >> this is going to be the challenge for all the panelists all along. we have, board members have five minutes for questioning. so that is going to be a challenge for everybody. so, thank you. and, so why is it it, the big question i get, is that why, what's the difference between talking on a cell phone and sitting and having somebody sitting next to you talking? and there is a difference. so who would like to take a stab at that one? dr. fisher? >> sure, thank you. when, there's a fundamental

difference. when you're sitting talking in the car with someone next to you, you are, have an extra pair of eyes and you don't have that when you're on the cell phone. second and importantly, when you're involved in a cell phone conversation, the protocol is not to stop talking while you're in the middle of an intersection or to stop talking when a situation might get dangerous. so, one is overinvolved in a cell phone conversation without the extra pair of eyes that a conversation in the car involves. i would like others on the panel perhaps answer that if they want to. >> so i think, again, we've got 53 seconds, so i think the issue here is, is that when you have a licensed driver in the car with you, that licensed driver is sort of mentally driving the car. i noticed that when i'm a passenger, we come to a stop sign, i'm clearing. i'm looking to make sure that that driver is not going to pull out when there's traffic. so i adjust my speech patterns according to what i

perceive the driving demands are. do you agree with that? >> exactly, yes. >> well, dr. caird you're chomping at the bit there. go ahead in 19 seconds. >> some people as passengers regulate their conversations at the drivers and others do not. so passengers can be distracting too. >> well, that's a good point. that is a very good point. thank you very much. so madam chairman, i have four seconds left and you can have it back. >> member weener. >> thank you. i was struck by -- a little buzz here. okay. dr. caird, i was struck by your slide number four. could we putnam per four up, dr. malloy. it's the, table with the two studies

woe so far had a discussion --. stand by for technical difficulties, huh? okay. back to the question on this chart. there are two different studies here, is that correct? >> sorry, that's correct. >> and i'm always drawn to data and in this particular case if this were a bar chart the big bars in both cases are outside person object or event. can you describe what that means? >> people walking by. billboards. looking for signs. all things outside the vehicle essentially. so it's a very broad category. >> and these are nothing new? >> not necessarily, unless you think about how the

environment, the traffic environment may be changing. digital billboards, other things. >> okay. now these studies though were, basically within the last deb qaed? >> that's correct. >> okay. so, a third, or 30%, somewhere between 24 and 30% are then, these are crashes due to outside crashes? >> that's correct. i would use those numbers as anne mentioned, police reported data is particularly unstable. that it's relatively the largest category. however it varies somewhat. >> okay. doing a little reading, there was a nhtsa report of a couple years ago looking at just inside distractions and in that case conversation with the other person was the biggest bar by far.

>> that's correct. and what, one, again, if you have a passenger, that passenger could either be protective, meaning they're with you, in the case of two older drivers, driving together. they can provide a protective effect they're looking out for hazards so forth. with teen drivers if you have passengers accidents go up as the number about teens increases. sometimes occupants, other passengers can be distracting too. so yes, that category. >> i noticed the third line on this particular table is the other occupant. that is somewhere between 10 and 20% of the crashes are due to the other occupants? >> yes, that's right. >> i like data too. >> yeah. so, you know, in the past i've always chided people to work on the big bars first and drive the big bars down

until the little bars now become the new big bars but at the moment we don't seem to have a focus on this other category of distraction being the, what goes on outside the vehicle. >> right. well, there are many, many different things in that category so we've done a couple studies. within on wind farms. one on driver billboards. those are external things that, lend themselves toe a little bit the experimental control. however the variety out there, do you have people walk by? again, if you come back to, what should the driver be doing? they should be focusing their attention on the roadway and let, not let their attention wander to things alongside the road that grab their attention necessarily. but that's common sense but we don't do it. >> dr. fisher. >> yes. we've looked at eye tracker studies of novice and

experienced drivers willingness to take their eyes off the road to look at things like billboards and turns out there that both novice and experienced drivers are equally likely to take especially long glances. long glances meaning those longer than four seconds. the problem with external billboards and distractions on the side they're seductive because you can pain taken your lane position but you will totally miss a pedestrian that steps off the sidewalk. >> i would presume some of these billboards could kind of capture you cog anything tiffly as well? >> the exact problem, dr. lee talked about, yes. >> all right. thank you. >> good morning. i'm going to ask my questions to the whole panel since you all can tell we're time sensitive i will let you decide who wants to actually answer them. i've been struck by how even in the chairman's opening comments, we're talking about visual, oral cognitive kinds of distractions sticking with cell phones.

seems there is a focus on eye glaze as i get this if we're liking. i don't see much about brain processing. how long you have to look forward isn't about the gaze, but the process interpreting what is going on and reacting to it, et cetera. is anyone doing research on brain activity and cans tell us whether or not are we only capturing 25 of the issues here because we have not focused on the cognitive, manual and other things there? >> i could take a stab at answers this. i think two important points when we separate visual, manual, cognitive we treat them as discrete elements of distraction when in fact they're tightly calledded. when my reading through the list of songs had a visual component, i was looking away from the road but there was also a cognitive component as i was trying to

think if that was spring strewn song or adell song? working memory, coupled with trying to make that decision. so that cognitive component was partly what led to the long visual glance away from the road, the visual distraction. so we really can't separate them. cognitive component in a number of laboratory simulator studies has repeatly shown the ability to coordinate objects seen in the environment and slow response to the events in the response selection stage of information processing some there is a cognitive component even when you're eyes are on the road. i think the big debate is whether most crashes that occur, the precipitating event grabs your attention, breaking us through the cognitive distraction allows you to respond in time. i think that's at big question at the moment. >> and i'll just, you can keep coming at me here but

dr. lee just made the point which is the central part of all those is the brain. i haven't seen much about eeg or functional mries or other places processing all those different aspects of what you just described. >> i would like to add quickly indeed if you don't look, you can't see. you can look but not see but if you don't look, you can't see. and what we're finding again and again and again people aren't looking. so therefore they're not sighing so there for they're crashing. it is true when you're looking you have to think about the brain but our problems as transportation safety professionals come about largely because the drivers aren't even looking. >> and switching to another one which different methods seem to give us different prevalence numbers here. i'm wondering amongst you without giving me strengths and limitations of all them, naturalistic give us sort of one end of this we look at cell phone records and other crash relationships other end of this.

so i'm kind of curious, first if you give us a sense of where the strongest methods may be without getting to strong for all of them. the other really part of my question, later we'll talk about enforcement bans, et cetera and people questioning their effectiveness. and clearly if we have a moving baseline here of just what the prevalence is to begin with makes it harder for us substantively to determine whether the interventions are effective or not. can one of you or all of you address that? >> i will say a few things. then i'm sure anne will have a few things to say as well. again i'd like to return to one of my original themes. a lot of levels or ways of approaching it are saying the sail thing. there are problems at epidemiological level. naturalistic data saying the same thing it increases crash risk. driving simulator we're seeing eyes off the road and longer reaction times. in essence they're saying the sail things. if you ask levels of evidence kind of question, they're all converge ant

less of an issue than if they diverge somewhere or another that would be more of a problem you have to sort it out. they're all saying the same thing in a way. >> before we get to dr. mccartt the challenge they may converge that way, but later somebody will say we put a ban in and insurance claims don't seem to match up. if i take my prevalence one place and measure the other the delta doesn't actually justify any other action. >> could you put up slide 11. i wanted to show a slide from the, naturalistic study, the 100-car study there have been debate focusing on crash risk estimates. one before that i think

there seems to be discrepancies and the our studies and naturalistic studies. for the 100 car study of passenger vehicles the first column of number is the odd ratios for different types of distractions. a center column is basically how frequently these distracts occur and then the right-hand column is when you put those things together you get a measure called population attributable risk which is basically the contributions of these different distractions to, in this case near crash and crash events. i think a couple of things this slide illustrates. one, it is a limitation of naturalistic study it is and almost all studies it is very difficult to measure cognitive distraction. so they can measure what they can observe basically but i think the other thing that you see here is that even though the risk of talking or listening on a

handheld device is not significant in, in this study, because it occurs so much more frequently than some of these other tasks, in fact it has a comparable contribution to these crash, near-crash events as dialing a handheld device. i think, i think one of the biggest things we don't know is, we don't know about cell phone use and other distractions across a variety of driving situations. and part of that what gets at i think is to what extent drivers self-regulate and you know, i put up the slide showing crash trends and you mentioned a study that the institute did looking at claims data where we did not find a significant decline in insurance claims data in states that hand held bans

and frankly some of these things don't add up. when you put the exptht to e a decline and we don't know all the reasons for that. some of it may be people switching to hands-free which our study would suggest is just as hazard does but i think another element there that drivers do self-regulate to some extent and maybe the riskiest drivers are the least well at self-regulating and i think these are some of the things we really, i don't know how to get a handle on them really well but i think they're a part of the puzzle. there is just an awful lot we don't know about the gamut of distractions, and drivers and all kinds of driving situations. >> great, thank you. >> vice chairman heart. >> thank you. dr. malloy, would you, bring up that slide as dr. mccartt described as slide number 11. i'm not sure what the source of it is. yes, that one. i would like to throw this question out to the entire panel because when i first

saw this i first thought in a nits at that present ages -- nhtsa present takes and i thought thought it was virginia tech study but i may be wrong. that is risk of normal driving. i would be interested to hear from you how it is interested driving with hands-free cell phones was shown to less risk than formnal driving. i would like to hear anybody on the panel speak to that. it was counter intuitive to me and didn't make any sense to me and i know there is divergence on the research and i would like to hear from anybody on the panel why hands-free use is viewed as safer than normal driving. yes, dr. lee. >> one possible explanation when we think about normal driving we may not be thinking of what actually happens during normal driving. many of us assume normal driving means that your eyes are on the road, you're attentive, you're concentrating on the road ahead and that may not be

the case. if in the case, in the course of normal driving you are actually distracted by a variety of things, reaching for objects and so on, the effect of the cell phone may actually keep you from doing more dangerous things while you're driving. and i think that's an important point in terms of that normal driving baseline. it may not be what some of us imagine driving to be. >> i -- >> anybody else? this is crucial point because i know, i'm sorry, that the department of transportation has declined to follow our recommendation regarding hands-free driving based on this study and this chart. that's why i'm really interested in getting to the heart of this issue. >> i believe the finding hands-free phone was beneficial was from a study of truck drivers. and you know, i think, and involved very few crashes. mostly lane devery ageses and traffic conflicts were the measures they used and i

would caution generalizing findings from a study of on the road, long distant truck drivers to the general driving population. i think they are, they're a whole driving schedule. the fact that they are prone to fatigue. that's the caution i would have with that finding. i don't, i don't believe virginia tech looked at hands-free phone use in their passenger vehicle study and don't have an estimate of that. >> thank you. anybody else on that question? >> sure. if you look at the figure that's up, which distractions increase crash risk? you come down to either dialing a cell phone or talk or listen to hands-free or handheld cell phone the last column, first column is 100 car study. these are odds ratios.

anything above one increases odds two, four. you see the 23 times for text-messaging being the worst obviously but if you calm down, talk, or listen you have the commercial vehicle study that was just mentioned. if you come across to the last, you have meta-analysis of these same things and you see a much higher ratio for handheld and hands free as a combined category increasing crash risks. this is combining five reasonable studies including the two anne mccartt described earlier and mcavoy and other two studies. it also brings in data from 100-car study. maybe that is better indication of the odds ratios on that. >> thank you. >> thank you. anyone else on that one? let me move to the next question. dr. caird, slide number two, struck me you had a huge dip in that slide, excuse me if i missed it. i would be interested in knowing what was the reason

for that eform must dip in the slide, if we could bring up that slide, please. >> i can't understand why it dropped so much. but again if you go to anne mccartt's data, any, this is farce data. there is lot of variability in reporting and maybe the category changed or states, something happened. i can't imagine that, you know all of sudden it dropped so quickly and swung back but that is the nature of the data. that is the point i tried to make with here. >> thank you. last i would like to follow up on a question that member sumwalt started and just hear the thoughts of two of you on the panel who did not have the opportunity to comment due to limited time, the difference speaking on a cell phone and speaking to the passenger beside you. >> oh, i would agree that the biggest difference is that the passenger is in the vehicle looking at the driving situation whereas the person on the phone or texting has no idea. i actually think there's

pretty subtle research that shows for fatal crashes anyway, passengers are at risk for teens. they're neither helpful nor not helpful for people in their 20s and for people 30 and older passenger are actually beneficial and in decreasing crash risk. >> i agree and i would only add that in the extreme situation, beyond just modulating the conversation according to the events on the road the passenger, the attentive passenger can reduce risks by acting as a collision warning system for drivers and pointing out hazards and screaming in the extreme case. >> thank you. >> well as the mother of three boys i will say that i am over 30 but i'm not sure that all of the passengers in my car actually are helpful to be driving task. so i definitely appreciate that there are certain types

of passengers that can be helpful to the driving traffic and others that can be distracting. i would like to go back to follow-up on a couple of the questions. member weener raise the question of the big bar and you are really our data panel in many respects and so what i'd like to ask you about, if we go back and we look at some of the slides that were provided, i think dr. caird's slide where we talked about the risk outside the vehicle, my question to you is, has this changed much in studies over the years? or has this been pretty constant? >> i would say, i don't know. i haven't seen subsequent studies that have looked at the bigger picture, the total number of distracted driving crashes or fatalities that gives a better indication on a crash by crash basis what category they necessarily fall into.

maybe some others have better data. >> but i'm talking for the external crash risk, the looking outside the vehicle? >> that's what i was referring to. >> any others having any other experience? one study or multiple studies looking at this over time? i think there is an issue there too to learn from that lesson. my follow-up question on that would have been, as i suspect this information is probably reflective of distractions that have been always present since the model-t. there is a lot going on outside the vehicle that you need sometimes to pay attention to and other times you ought not to be paying attention to. there have been pretty girls probably since people started driving cars that, you know, attracted people's attention outside of the vehicle. so, can we control, for those external distractions, people rubber he can inning on the roadway?

people looking at pedestrians? can we troll for those? -- control for those. >> the big danger as i think i said in many cases is the novice driver. with experience drivers learn to rubber neck less. and i think one of the ways to control that is through education programs that just don't ex-sort the driver not to look but actually show the driver he or she would crash. if engaged in any of that rubber he can inning. driver education programs now do not do that and many of the new studies are suggesting that indeed for the novice driver, you can reduce rubber necking. you can reduce the dangerously long glances inside the vehicle and you can increase likelihood that the novice driver will actually anticipate a crash. i think a big bar is a novice driver and, i think there are things that can be done to reduce the size of

that bar. >> your study had the big bar that you referred to, wasn't focused on novice drivers dr. caird, is that right? that is all drivers? >> that's correct. that is all drivers. >> question to you all what does research tell us about engaging in multiple concurrent tasks? and what does that research help to inform us about when it comes to guidelines or requirements, laws how does research help us inform good policy decisions? >> i will take a quick stab at that the research helps us inform good policy decisions because it lets us know among other things what the durations of glances inside the vehicle can be, what, what the maximum duration of those glances can be. what the, minimal duration of glances on forward roadway can be among other things. and tasks and displays need to be designed that do not

go beyond those maximum and minimum limits. and i think that's in part where the nhtsa visual manual guidelines are going. so on and so forth but they have nowhere near evolved enough yet yet i think to have an impact on policy. we're starting that way but we haven't done enough research. >> only apply to invehicle systems? >> no provide categories ever distract shun alternating glances inside and on forward roadway. anything in the vehicle, at which you are glancing whether it was pneumatic device, integrated vehicle or cd in the car. that is why, one level those five categories are important because it suggests that all those devices where you're alternate iting glances inside and outside the vehicle are identical in terms of one thing and that is the minute time you

should spend on forward roadway and maximum glance you should make inside the car. >> okay. . . and they are within the control of the driver. some of these other distractions are too, but you think that if you think about being able to

change driver behavior, some things really are beyond the drivers control, including what is going on outside the vehicle. >> dr. lee? >> yes. i think education is useful, but limited. and i think that some of the new technology that can move into cars can help address both distractions within the vehicle and outside the vehicle. as i alluded to in my slide, showing technology, monitoring the driver, monitoring the environment and then directing the driver's attention, i think that sort of technology can be incorporated into the vehicle to provide in a sense real-time coaching and feedback directing the driver's gaze away from objects in the environment where they could become distracted. so technology that might track the drivers keys in real-time in production vehicles, i think that something that is futuristic at the moment but feasible in the long term.

>> thank you all very much. i will turn to member some old. >> thank you. can i ask dr. molloy to pull up slide number five, and maybe one more after that, rob. on this particular slide, it appears if i'm reading this correctly, that the only detriment to performance associate with cell phone conversations is a quarter second increase in reaction time. did i read that correctly? >> yes, but let me qualify. this is a meta-analysis winner combining across a lot of different studies, away six is the one that feeds into the quarter second. what we are not showing necessarily is a whole lot of studies that have necessarily correctly measured headway and speed in a variety of things.

such as i.a. movements. so we are not able to really bring that to bear on cell phone conversation. so i would qualify the data a little bit. there's been a lot of studies since, maybe there's a better indication of that. >> and i appreciate the clarification because i thought if we are here only because a quarter of a second increase in reaction time, then we may as well go home. does it is a lot more significant than that. and as you point out there are other studies that show, for example, and i realize that there are a lot of conflicting studies and things, that's one thing i've learned from the literature review. in 2007 indicated that drivers have difficulty when they're on the cell phone, have difficulty maintaining speeds. so don't want to understate the significance of cell phone usage

while driving. >> so again, i would say across combining ethics from a number of studies, we were not able to come up, you can interpret it differently though, essentially saying while people don't sufficiently adapt to being cognitively distracted is another way to interpret it. and using and point of some of the limitations of experiment the research is that really, that combination is a very, very optimistic view of the best performance. they're still a detriment. and that when people do behave in a vehicles with on cell phones is much worse. >> thank you. make you very much. dr. mccartt, i was interested in your last slide which says basically we may not be able to understand fully understand, we may be will to reduce the issues of distraction without fully understanding the problem. and i can relate to that.

i used to talk about something called error management, whereby we are not going to necessarily prevent people from making mistakes, but what we can do is keep those airs from having consequential results. i think you're saying the same thing here, is that we can develop technology to compensate for these errors. we do want to put all of our eggs in that basket and giuseppe will sit back and do whatever they want to be a blot on the technology. but the technology could be another layer of defense to get anything you'd like to elaborate on regarding that? >> no. i would say couple of people have mentioned education, and i think there's a long history of studies in highway safety that suggests that educating drivers about risk is rarely enough. >> i'm sorry. i didn't hear that. >> is rarely enough to change behavior. some areas like seat belts, we've been very successful in passing strong laws and

enforcing them strongly, to change behavior. but i think there's a great deal of promise. most and highway safety would agree with me with these new crash avoidance technologies that can, again, help prevent or mitigate a crash regardless of the source of the inattention of the driver. but as you say, these are new, they are not well tested, we don't know how they will work. it may be that drivers will adapt so that they are riskier but believing technology will save them. there's a lot we don't know but it is very promising. >> i appreciate your comment, education should not be the primary layer of defense. in fact, if you look at the systems safety order of precedence as outlined in the mill. >> , no standard 882, which is a common standard for a system safety, the order of precedence is designed something, design it

well and then guard some form of fashion, then warned, and then last is training and procedures. so we need a combination of all the but we shouldn't be putting all of our eggs in the basket of let's train and educate people, and that's what sounds like you were saying as well. thank you very much. >> member weener. >> i'd like to go back to the discussion we were having about accommodation times. the figure of two seconds of eye time off the road was brought up your what's the significance of the two seconds? probably dr. fisher, since you talked about that in your slides. >> there was a study which looked at how long the eyes were off the road, and the likelihood

of a crash. >> speak up just a little bit. >> there was a study in the simulator at how long the eyes were off the road and the likelihood of a crash, and some 80% of the crashes roughly were due to the 20% of the glances that were longer than 1.5, 1.6 seconds, two seconds. so in driving simulator, if you look at the tales of the distribution you find that when the glances are especially long, it's during those events that indeed crashes ocher. there's also, the 100 car study which takes an interval, "one second after" an event occurs, five seconds before, if the driver is looking away for a total of two seconds during that 52nd before, "one second after" there's an increased risk of crashing. so the two seconds comes about as an averaging if you will

across a number of different studies. that basically show it's the extra long glances, the dangers of long classes that create crashes. >> so the behavior then of looking up, looking in, looking up, looking in, is there a physiological accommodation time for the eyes to look in, look out? >> yes, there is. >> does that change with age? >> yes, it does. i don't know the exact figures but both of those are true. there's an accommodation time. your eyes have to focus at a closer distance when you're inside the vehicle and larger distance when you're outside the vehicle. as you age a time change. with major points i was making, and it's not in the individual guidelines is that indeed you can glance down for two seconds, up for half a second, down for two seconds, and you would still be consistent with the needs of visual guidelines. they're not considering how long

you will need to look outside the vehicle and hard to comprehend and assess potential risk. i think that's a major weakness in those guidelines. >> so it's important to recognize the cognitive load, the cognitive recognition time, or if i might, the cognitive accommodation. because you can look outside but it takes some time to recognize what you're looking at? >> yes. that's exactly what i would put it. and i would add when your doing an in vehicle task, already are cognitively distracted because your to keep some memory of where you are scrolling through the music, where you are in the menu system. so it's not like you're looking down, then you're looking up cognitively unloaded but rather you're looking up and you are cognitively lotus so take even more time i think for you to assess what's happening spent most of his claim would to

multitask. now, what is actual multitasking? isn't multitasking or multiplex in? >> no one knows for sure so we don't have yet the i studies that show that we are processing -- there's a doubt that we're trying to do two things at once we are compromised. i would let others speak to the point they want. >> any other comments by the panel? >> i would like to add one point that we haven't talked about the think is quite important. regarding this issue of multitasking. i think that in general drivers have the illusion they can multitask better than they can actually multitask. so they're overconfident in their abilities to text and drive, talk and drive at the same time. so there's detriment and performance that comes with multitasking is often unappreciated by the driver.

>> actually then are we arriving at the recent for texting such a high risk? because of the cognitive workload and bald with texting? >> i think texting brings together sort of a perfect storm of dangerous activities. one is the visual off the road glances where you're not processing the road because you're not looking at it. the second is the cognitive engagement, the sort of conversation that is going on. and i think in addition to that there is the social compunction to continue that conversation. and beyond also the failure in the course of driving to get feedback that you've just done something very dangerous. for me, i was lucky, most of us are lucky, we look away from the road for a long period. we don't crash generally.

and that failure to get feedback, failure for the road environment to signal when we done something dangerous think leads us to overestimate our abilities, and that contributes to texting. dangerous because we don't recognize that it is dangerous. >> thank you. >> member rosekind. >> i have a couple questions but want to thank member weener or bring it back. what i saw before, this is all about the brain. we can talk about cognitive workload that is all about the brain. the brain has decided where to look, how long. the eyes movement is just a behavioral outcome. but it's really all about the central processing that is going on. that's really kind of the question you how whether it is untrue, extra, how much is going on. even the manual part it's all about the cognitive processing that is going on. i mention that because it seems like with such a passionate this

happens with such a focus on the ie movement i gaze its kind like we're stuck in a methodology because it's observable and we can measure but it may grossly underestimate the issues going on here. just because the challenge is getting to the cognitive through other mechanisms are kind of leaving that out. that said, i'm curious, is there any studies showing cell phone use and interactions with alcohol, drugs? any one of those other things, what happened to performance, some great studies that show -- anything like that in the cellphone arena? >> there's one study by nick ward at the university of minnesota on the. i don't recall the date of them but it has been done. i'm not sure that it is additive but it has been done. >> i can't give you more specifics.

>> but it increases risk beyond -- >> be honest with you on the sure. it's a simulator study with alcohol and distraction. they were trying to do it all. >> can anybody give me a sense, there's been this focus on ideas. are people even good judges of that? when we are teaching people, we're down to is really finite two seconds, good, you know, above 50 people have a sense of being able to judge how long their gaze is? >> initially i don't think people do. which is why we really fail in our driver education programs. but it doesn't take long with a little training program for someone to get that sense. having said that, professor lee's observations in vehicle displays can be very seductive. doesn't necessary override the train but there's no doubt

whatsoever that i, to come experience the same thing that john did, and found that i thought i was looking inside the car for only short greater time to address our time to myself i realize how bad i was. so i would say to you, the panel, people out there do not understand how long their spending in the car. and we should really teach them how long to second is because they don't understand the. then people can take away that learning and use it. not always completely effective. we need technology to help us. but boy, we can get better with just a little bit of insight into that process. >> when automation was introduced into aviation cockpits there was a concern about what is called head downtown. the first actions were people playing with computers instead of looking out what was going on. we are bring all this technology into the car whether it is built in or nomadic am basically which is created the same situation. and seemed surprised of as great a problem for us.

i'm curious, how would you characterize our sense of just the sort of baseline relative risk of driving? we are adding great charts and great data. but i'm wondering sort of how comfortable are we with just sort of the baseline relative risk of all kind of sets going inside, outside come and center. do we feel. gibby gilbert accountable knowing what the relative risk is when we start adding cell phone and other things? and a french the way our minds differentiate i guess? >> i'll take a stab at this. stupidly because none of the other panelists want to, but i think one of the challenges really understand what is baseline driving. and as i mentioned before i think where the solutions sometimes, particularly experiment setting of simulated experiments that baseline driving is inattentive driver, driver doing nothing other than

driving. the fact is most of the time people are doing other things while they try. the majority of the time spent driving involves other activities challenges driving. so at that level i think it's important to understand that baseline risk. another perspective on baseline risk is a societal commitment to safety. if you look at what sweden is doing, they have a policy, division zero policy would any fatalities or permanently impairing injury is one too many. so they're looking to zero fatalities. we have 30 plus thousand fatalities a year, zero is a long way from where we are now for baseline driving. >> i would agree. we don't really have a good understanding of baseline driving but a couple of the studies, the couple that verified with phone records whether drivers were on the phone during crashes, at a naturalistic driving study to

compare a particular distraction like talking on the phone to a control period where the driver made the doing, it's like normal driving. i think in our study, for example, it was, the finding was that your risk of crashing when you're talking on the phone is four times, it would be whatever else you were doing. so some of the studies to incorporate whatever that baseline driving is i think. >> i'm just going to report to member weener. after there's a study that shows the multitasking is a misconception. doesn't happen. we all think we can do. several students thinking their experts added can't do it. >> thank you. vice chairman hart. >> thank you. as the cabinet with the distractions of us in the first driver was driving the first c car. there's lots of distractions

that it takes two hands to either type in often as when testifying about cell phone use why am i concert and so force bash to cell phone use. we follow the accidents. we've seen an increase in accidents with cell phone use but my question to you in the general umbrella under the general umbrella of distracted driving, have you seen any troubling trends with respect to any other distractions beside choose a personal electronic devices? >> i would just reiterate texting as one of the major themes. in addition to that everything that is coming into your cell phone in the future is your facebook as well as texting ella social embeddedness coming into your phone in the future, if you're not already using it. that's the troubling trend. >> i would just like to emphasize the future is here,

and all of that stuff is coming into, is in the car in some form with smart phones but i think it's important to keep the rate of technology change in my. if you think about the 100 car studies, many of the results we been going back to repeatedly here, that was started in january 2003, completed january 2004. all those days that we've been talking about were collected during that period. since then, facebook was introduced in 2004. twitter 2006, the iphone 2007. that apps for the iphone 2008. a lot has changed fundamentally changed. all that is moving into the car, either in the smart phone or increasingly in the car itself. so we are talking about these issues of distraction relying a lot on a data set that doesn't include any of that. and on experiments that involve

little beyond cell phone conversation. >> thank you. one of the issues will be looking at is how to disable distracting devices with respect to driver use while not necessary disabling them with respect to passenger use. i don't know if it's too early for us to have any data on anything like that. if the passenger is listening to music and the drivers as if that's what my favorite songs, or the passenger has started a bluetooth conversation to the car phone and the driver is engage in that, do we have any sense of where that would fit on the spectrum with the driver not actually actively doing it, but being in the car and engage in activity nonetheless because the passenger is doing it? >> i think there are a number of technologies that are being developed with our inning to differentiate and allow passengers access and use of

technology, and in prohibiting the drivers from doing so. i don't think there is anyone clear and have to do that. it's difficult technological problem, and so i think that that's one element of a future car that will hopefully be smart enough to know who is doing what in the vehicle and grant permission accordingly. >> i wanted to mention one case regarding your current question and the former question. what happens when to distracted drivers meet each other in the road? one on the navigation device, the second passenger pair having a conversation, and getting in a crash. so pretty soon the system starts interacting with each other. that goes towards all the addition technology for the passenger or the driver. >> anybody else on that question? okay, thank you very much. >> dr. fisher, i just wanted to follow up on something because i

think the tu-second issue is one that is important but it's not completely clear to me. we were talking about the two-second glance away, is that what you would consider an extra long glance or a dangerous glance, two seconds? >> the danger increases as the length of the glance increases but generally glance is under two seconds on not leaving to a statistically significant increases in crash risk. that doesn't mean that if we had a larger sample size we would set any glance away was dangers. but we allow some risk associated with activities and so we're seeing really only significantly passionate statistically significant glances longer than two seconds. >> two seconds and longer? >> yes. >> so there's statistically significant increase in glances that are two seconds of duration

or longer? >> statistically significant in crash risk in glances at her two seconds or longer. >> so is two seconds something that we want to be shooting for, or do we want to be under two seconds? >> two seconds or under. >> okay. >> exactly two seconds. is not going to make much difference i don't think. >> sell two seconds and longer increase crash risk is not necessarily two seconds is increased crash risk. because i'm also hearing you say to second and under is okay. and so i think where is the line, if we're trying to stop the baseline for what is safe to? >> under two seconds. >> under two seconds. so two seconds and over is increased crash risk? >> yes. >> okay. and i thank you very much,

doctor lee, for bringing up the point about the age of the data being collected because that's something that i think is very important to put into context but if you're looking at data that's collected almost 10 years ago, the environment that we're offering into that is very different. i think even when we look back to the other study, the dtt i did that was on commercial vehicles, which the vice-chairman was referring to that reduced risk based on the hands-free conversation, that data is also fairly old. that was self-selected, participants in the pic and i think people who are using hands-free seven years ago were way ahead of the curve seven years ago because i don't know if y'all have any comment on that of hands-free versus handheld in a study of with a choice to go hands-free at that time said about the drivers. >> i think you bring up an excellent point, that is a challenge with all of the

naturalistic data in the sense that what you're looking at is a self-selected sample of people who choose to use hands-free versus handheld. and so that could be differences and demographic variables, wealthy people having the built-in hands-free, maybe also been generally safer, more experienced drivers. so there are a lot of those sorts of variables that are difficult to pull out as you might really understand what's driving risk. i would also like to add if i could, going forward, even though we are collecting data as part of the sharp to pro gun, another large naturalistic data collection, the analysis of those data will be coming to us over the next few years i as we analyze those data, innovation will be coming into the fleet and the environment is changing almost more quickly than we can

analyze the data, let alone collected. so i think this is a persistent problem going forward. technology is changing very, very quickly. our ability to understand this changes is relatively slow. >> i would add, too, that a limitation of the naturalistic studies is they can't come because they can only document what they can see. they are unable to do a good job identifying solely hands-free homes. -- phones. so i guess the challenge, i want to the forward is we've talked about the need of distractions that are out there and they are certain not limited to portable electronic devices. there are many. how do we move the person in the driver's seat on the continuum to be an attentive driver? what is it that your data, your research is showing us is

effective in moving our population in societal norms, dr. caird, how to make the attentive driver what the norm should be and the expectations? how do we achieve that? >> spent i think a start is the anti-texan loss when. i think the seatbelt laws, some of them are secondary. but parents starting wearing their seatbelt i remember backing out of the driveway when my daughter was five and she screamed at me, daddy, daddy, i had no idea what the problem was and she had put on her seatbelt. i simply always but am i see the. i think once adults start stop texting and stop using their devices, that would be a beginning message to the kids. second, dr. rosekind i believe as whether we have a good idea of how want to seconds.

we don't. and unless we are actually taught how long two seconds is we're not really going to be able to attend properly to in vehicle display. so i think those are two other things that are moving us forward. the parents now not texting, and then ourselves learning process parents and children exactly how short a glance has to be inside the vehicle. but not by itself having said that is not enough if we need technology to i should help us get out of the technology from because sometimes -- we are still looking inside the car too long. >> well, i'm simultaneously optimistic that we can do something to make a difference. with a whole array of different things available, towards education, enforcement so forth. but at the same time i also know how hard it is to change driver behavior. is a very fundamental problem, and without feedback that, in

fact, you're doing something that potentially can cause a crash, and not having that near miss when you adjust your behavior accordingly, or even if you have to go back to previous habitual behavior of using her cell phone and cel so forth. it's clear we need to do something, otherwise many, many people will get hurt and killed. >> thank you. i, being an engineer have to be optimistic about technology. i think technology can help with the visual distraction in terms of providing real-time coaching for when drivers have looked away from the road for 200 that technology is very close i think to being implemented in vehicles, being able to warn drivers would have looked away from the road for two seconds or longer. and help them understand that risk. i think technology is also helping to address some of the cognitive issues that i think as

designers we need to be well aware of the demands we're putting on people. if they try they cannot engage in cognitively demanding task. and if they would in front of their computers. i think considering the car as a mobile internet device is a wrongheaded thought that it's worth thinking about that in terms of what people can do as they are driving. i think we are to be very careful about overloading drivers. i think we need to move beyond just the cognitive consideration of distraction to really think about the social component. that it's not just all cognitive. that there is a social influence that is tremendous, adjusting social norms is i think one important component. one way to think about distraction may be in terms of the disease that spreads through the population, that when you text, that text message goes out to a number of other people who may be driving. so it spreads that way. it also spreads by the noting

that it is normal or acceptable to do these things while you are driving. i think think about distraction as the disease as opposed to just two seconds off the road, clasping days i think is important i think technology can provide useful feedback to guide people and help them understand those risks. >> microphone? >> i would agree with a comment to i don't think there's one magic solution, one silver bullet. i think all these things are necessary. i guess i would tend to see somebody technological or the engineer, kind of engineering solutions. john had mentioned as maybe having some of the most potential. >> thank you all so much for your presentations and for candidly answering a question for you have given us a lot to think about. we will take about a 20 minute break and we will resume at

10:30. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> will have more from this summit coming up shortly but first a look at tonight's program here on c-span2. with the u.s. senate on per a this week and next we're featuring some of the booktv's programs in primetime. >> tonight on c-span, reporters

and photographers who cover the conflict in syria, afghanistan, libya and egypt talk about their experiences and why they keep going back to these war zones spent i've always said that some of these guys, i don't know you but you may be the same time, have a reverse personality. when things are really, really good they can be unmanageable. [laughter] and when things are really, really bad, they are calm. i mean, called. it's an amazing. i'm not saying they don't feel fear. they do. if they tell you they don't they are lying. i've seen tyler really scared. but they manage it. they challenge. when they have to work they just concentrate and their very, very calm. then you have to wait today for helicopter and they're bouncing off the inside of the 10th going nuts nuts because it is a calm. but i think that when they are out there in the middle of the, and i worked side-by-side with photographers to i don't cover the capital. i mean, i've worked from the

field to when you're out of it is so busy and it can be so intense, and are able to kind of leave it behind because you are not in the sorts of situations when your home. when your home and get stuck in traffic, you get used to being stuck in traffic but it's not so bad. >> after that, see attribute to barbara mikulski. last month she became the longest-serving female member of congress in u.s. history. >> deep in my heart i'm still that congresswoman from the third congressional district. i'm still a fighter and i'm still a reformer. i am still that young girl in the blue jumper. i'm still that person. i'm going to continue to work with all you industry each and everyone of you are here because you make a difference. i will continue to work together to make change. and may the force be with us.

[cheers and applause] >> and then a tribute to two former senators, howard baker and bob dole. and their honor by the bipartisan policy center for their combined 100 years of public service. >> it was a great honor and a genuine privilege to serve with each of you, to learn from each of you. i know you wished i had learned more, bob, but to learn -- [laughter] and quite frankly simply to know you both. >> reporting on war and conflict, and tributes to current senator barbara mikulski, and former senators howard baker and bob dole. it's all tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> this weekend marks the anniversary of the bloodiest battle to be fought during the civil war. up to that point, the battle of shiloh with almost 24,000 casualties, and we'll tour the battlefield with chief park ranger stacy allen saturday at

6 p.m. eastern, and sunday night at seven the angel of the battlefield and founder of the red cross, clara barton, operates a missing soldier's soldier's office in the washington, d.c. boardinghouse until 1868. join us as we rediscover the third floor office as it is prepared for renovations. this weekend on american history tv on c-span3. >> now more from a recent distracted driving summit hosted by the national transportation safety board. this panel looks at the risk of handheld phones and law enforcement efforts to ban drivers from using the device. this is an hour and a half. >> if everyone could take their seat. we will begin. doctor bruce, would you please introduce the second panel?

>> our second panel will address distracted driving laws and enforcement. more than half of all states have some form of ban on cell phone use by some drivers and virtually all states have laws against distracted driving against distracted driving behaviors that pose a hazard. in this panel, we will discuss the differences in how states have adopted restrictions as well as examining the effects of those laws. the panel is composed of people that work on safety issues from different perspectives, the legislator who makes the laws, the state office that oversees traffic safety, the officer that writes the ticket violation, the attorney to prosecute traffic offenders and a researcher who evaluates the effects of policy actions. >> our first present on this panel is senator bruce starr of oregon. center store has served in the oregon legislature for more than a decade where he serves as vice chair of the senate

transportation and economic development committee. senator starr is also the vice-chairman of the national conference of state legislatures. and has chaired the ncsl standing committee on transportation. senator starr, would you leaders off by talking about the attitude you hear from your legislative colleagues, what is said in the hallways and cloakrooms about distracted driving laws and cell phone and texting bans? >> thank you very much. i'm pleased to be here this morning but i appreciate chairman hersman and ntsb including the legislative perspective, this important form on attentive driving. state legislative have had a continue to have an important role to play in this critical discussion and policy debate. motor vehicle laws are under the purview of the state in these issues have been a will continue to be debated and contemplate in state capitals across the country. each state will address these issues and informative fashion that best addresses the

differences and challenges resident in the state. distracted driving is not a new issue for state legislators. according to the ctia, the wireless association in june 2011, 196 billion text messages were sent or received in the u.s., up from 50% in 2009. as we know, many of those text messages are being sent from moving vehicles which has led most experts agree that distracted driving is a significant traffic safety problem. 5% of drivers have been seen talking on hand-held phones and the observation survey of drivers and traffic. the prevalence of cell phones new research publicize crashes have fueled many debates about the role of cell phones play in driver distractions. since 2000, legislators and every state, the district of columbia and puerto rico have considered legislation related to distracted driving or more

specifically, driver cell phone use. in 2011, legislators and 37 states considered approximately 160 driver distraction bills. no stay completely banned all phones for all drivers although alaska to consider but didn't pass legislation in 2011. state legislation usually addresses a range of issues, including particular wireless technology, and specific privatize. nine states where the driver use of handheld phones. nevada passed the 2011th law that makes it a misdemeanor, not a traffic infraction for using handheld device while driving. the most common driver distraction measured debated in legislatures last year was prohibition on texting while driving but as of december 2011, laws in 35 states specifically banned texting while driving for all drivers. indiana, maine, nevada, north dakota, pennsylvania past texting while driving prohibition in 2011 that many

other states including oregon, changed their loss last year. penalties for violating -- taxi while driving is a mystery that covers, carries one of $50 fine. while in california the traffic contraction carries a $20 fine. and by others in nebraska wellpoint ss against their license and pay a $200 fine. in 2011, connecticut change its definition of serious traffic violations to include the defensive texting while driving. in 2011, 15 states introduced legislation related to teens and young drivers use of mobile phones operating a motor vehicle. north dakota, new mexico and texas enacted those laws. the texas lottery which young drivers and using a wireless communication device will operate a vehicle, motorcycle or moped except in the case of an emergency. maryland, mississippi, north carolina considered legislation

specifically related to young drivers who use cell phones to send text messages. north carolina would have appropriate $100,000 to the state highway division to make teenagers away of the risk and penalties of texting while driving. north dakota enacted a 2011 law assessing the mayor appoints to restrict drivers were caught using electronic communication devices. as you can see, the states have a variety of ways to address this very important issue. i think there are clearly challenges to enact legislation and there are arguments we hear as legislators against these particular laws. i think primary what year is an infringement on personal liberty. don't tell you what i should or shouldn't be doing in my vehicle as i drive. we also hear about other distractions. what about all these other distractions i hear from my colleagues? reading, if you see people reading a book by the drive for reading the newspaper. what about eating? what about those rowdy children in the backseat?

and then quite honestly and there's a plethora of other activities that are not related to driving that individuals do while they drive. i also hear from my colleagues the lack of data or conflicting data as it relates to this particular issue. and perhaps even old data. one of the things i continue to hear is that is an issue that talking on a hands-free cell phone is just as dangerous or just as distracting as talking on a handheld phone? those are issues that legislators contemplate and grapple with during their legislative session on a year in and year out basis. the other piece of this, and as you saw through my quick run to the state laws, is the enforcement issue and a variety of ways that state legislators are choosing to penalize drivers who ultimately are convicted or charged with distracted driving. so enforcement issues is something that legislators also have to grapple with. finally, in this particular

section, i believe legislators are crowded with the issue of smart phones, and al all of the apps that are available and how to manage that piece of this conversation. today, your smartphone very easily can replace your garment for navigation. so those are issues that legislators are grappling with. i think it's important to continue to focus on education and research. the research has to be appropriate for nonbiased independent science-based research data will try this conversation i'm convinced. and then finally education. education as we've seen in other public policy areas, like seatbelts i think was mentioned earlier, education is the key to behavior modification. and legislators i believe will be partners in the conversation. thank you. >> our second presenter will be chris murphy, the director of california's office of traffic safety and the immediate past, chairman of the governors highway safety association.

mr. murphy co-leads the california strategic highway safety plan and is an active in numerous traffic safety committees and advisory groups. mr. murphy, i invite your presentation. >> thank you. in california, if you received a ticket for handheld, or for texting, it will cost $159. bother baseline is $20 but when you had penalties and assessment you can see it becomes much more expensive. we have a total ban for drivers under 18. we have a handheld ban for adult and a texan and while driving. and those are both primary enforcement. in 2011 we did a statewide observational survey, kind of mayors what nhtsa have done. we found that my% of all drivers were estimated to be talking or texting -- 9%, a typical day

during the daytime. it's also interesting to note, we do intercept surveys and we did 12010 and 2011. californians last summer stated that texting and talking are the biggest safety concern on california roadways. and nearly 84% of drivers stated that cell phone, that the conversations or texting while driving constitutes the most serious driving distractions. and if we take a look at enforcement, it's interesting to note that in 2011 we had almost half a million convictions for handheld citations for drivers up considerably from 2009. if you look at our texting, obviously those have been increasing. however, they pale in comparison to our handheld sites. and for under 18 on the total ban you can see those numbers are very small.

they have been going down a little bit. we look at last april. we kicked off the it's not worth a statewide campaign, and to support, just for the federal government, and we also allocated $1.5 billion in paid me where we developed three commercials. we use nhtsa commercials, tv, radio, billboards, social media, and to get the message out that it's not worth it. that was our campaign message. we also asked police departments and the highway patrol to do added enforcement during that month. we had 280 police departments and 100 chb area offices combined to write 52000 citations in just that one month. we know of 272 known printed newspaper articles, we also use 625 fixed changeable message signs to promote, to actually

promote the message, which is handheld tickets, $159, it's not worth the. we have the same message for texting. our fatal crashes in april were down about 7% when you look at 2011 as compared to 2010. so, our handheld bands is effected i can tell you that at uc berkeley last month look at two years prior to our laws, actually coming in, being effective. and two years afterward the overall deaths were down 22%. we know that handheld driver deaths were down about 47%. part of our intercept survey is we asked drives, i think this is really important, we wanted to find out if our handheld law decreased over all cell phone use. and 40% said yes, they use their cell phone in total us since we had our handheld law.

i iihs also in the study, i think that's very important. they found that 44% of the drivers surveyed in states with the handheld band, reported they use their cell phones handheld and hands-free less than states that did not have a handheld ban. and, finally, i iihs found that the ban on hand-held phones while driving and they said they can have a bigger long-term lasting effect in curbing handheld cell phone use. and that was in new york, connecticut and the district of columbia. so i think the california experience has been good. i think our handheld ban has saved lives. those are all my comments. >> thank you. our third present will be doctor neil chaudhary, vice president of preusser research group that he will discuss his recent work

with the national highway safety administration to distracted driving concession project in hartford, connecticut. in syracuse, new york. is to the project record for the evaluation of the similar programs to implement on a statewide level. dr. chaudhary, i invite your presentation. >> thank you but i'm just going to very briefly talk about a little bit about nhtsa's distracted driving demonstration project that happened in hartford, west hartford and east hartford, connecticut, as was syracuse, new york. can i? no problem. okay, so there were four ways of high visibility enforcement occurring over roughly a year. in hartford, west hartford and east hartford, all three of those police departments were involved as well as the state police. in syracuse, the syracuse police department, the county sheriff's office and the state police all

contrary to the ticketing there. nhtsa provided paid media for the enforcement efforts, which included phone in one hand, take it in another slogan. and there was extensive media, including on site visits by secretary lahood. the design of the evaluations included certain data elements that we collect to be able to evaluate the program, the number of tickets written by police, how many earned media clips occurred during the time period, how strong was the actual media, the awareness and attitude about the enforcement by the public, collected through a one page survey. and observations of actual phone use made on corners observing

drivers. there were also comparisons that we could establish to what extent this was any changes were a result of enforcement versus changes going on naturally in the area. very briefly, the results were quite nice. there was very good media penetration, at least 50% of the respondents by the end of the program in connecticut had heard these slogans, phone in one hand, take it in the other. ticketing was ginormous, between 99 and 190 tickets per 10,000 population. that was approximately 20,000 tickets written over that time period in both states combined. handheld phone use clearly went down. the highlight is 6.8% handhelds

use in connecticut dropped to 2.9 by the post. and texting also went down, both states ban texting while driving, and officers to issue tickets for texting while driving, though definitely not to the same extent as handheld tickets. so in conclusion, it was pretty effective. cell phone ticketing was substantial. observers, observations showed a decrease in use. awareness was high by the public. message recognition was there. and there are some unknowns as a result, like i have mentioned, this was a really strong effort by the police, do we actually need that level to have the results we had. do the rates stay down, or once enforcement stops, do they go back up, and how quickly do they

go back up if they do? what happens to these drivers when they stop using the handheld phone? do they go to hands-free? do they stop using altogether? what percentage moves to what? and, unfortunately, as was mentioned by the earlier panel, the data required to make a good evaluation of the impact of this program on crashes was not available. so we weren't able to really look and see how this enforcement program affected crashes. that's it. ..

vehicular fatalities. >> is there another mike on up there? just one at a time. there we go. >> is there another one on? >> did that take care of it? i can try another microphone. okay. thank you. basically taking a look at faces we actually prosecuted, our first experience with distracted driving vehicular fatality prosecution actually occurred back in 2001. all of this predates any kind of a texting or cell phone ban. t in pennsylvania we had first texting law, incomplete as it is we had the first one passed. we prosecuted these on the

scope of careless driving and reckless driving. we have alleged and been successful establishing beyond a reasonable doubt that this constitutes, reckless driving constitutes conduct that meets requirements homicide by vehicle. it is difficult to establish because it required a lot of education along the way. the status we're concerned where distracted driving is at least in our area if not in our country is that it's equivalent to where dui had been. that it is beginning to invade the collective sub conscience but it's not there at that same level. and so steps need to be taken to get there. through the practical experience we've had with cases it's beginning to show. it has been of all kind. our first one that we did back in 2001 did not involve any technology. involved a bag of mcdonald's food and an elderly woman

died as a result. we had them due to young people messing around in the car talking. we had them due to all kinds of technology used in all kind of ways be they gpss, texting, communicating both on handheld and also on hands-free. that was specifically a commercial motor vehicle driver who went through a red light and killed a businessman in our county because he was engaged in communication on his hands-free device. on his bluetooth. the one i want to turn my attention to is joanna cybert i do not single her out because who she is as a person but because of what happened in this case. while we typically see. we had three things going on and this is the thing we can the it not forget about distracted driving. it is a dangerous driving charactertic usually seen in conjunction with other types of dangerous driving

activity by people who engage in them repeatedly, from the off cited 100 car naturalistic study, i believe 80% of the crash or near crash occurrences were caused by 20% of the people. recidivism is a true danger and quite frankly, our laws are woefully inadequate to address recidivists in the areas of distracted driving as well as other dangerous driving areas that the exclude d.u.i. until attention is paid in that area, we will not be able to get at our most likely causers of fatalities and serious injuries, such as miss seibert. i called it the trifecta of death because as a trial attorney i'm obliged to come up with a cheesy catchphrase to stick in the jury's mind. that was mine. speeding 69 in 55 zone. tailgating. how was she able to do that, you can be engaged in

distraction yet track the car in front of you what we shoes doing. why didn't she go off the road? she was engaged in up and glancing tracking her lead vehicle. when her lead vehicle went to the left she had no more lead vehicle an instead killed a police officer. because she was engaged in two distracted driving functions. she was multitasking that day. she was engaged in multimedia functions on her iphone. we're not sure which type of multimedia function but we know she was entering data input and as well in the application pros zest of makeup this is the stretch of roadway on that day, as you see. it's a four-lane highway. very bright, nice, sunny beautiful fall day. that is the crash scene area. and there's the cone taper after she went through it. standing right behind that cone taper was office david tome who was reconstructing an unrelated vehicular fatality that occurred

previously. this is her car. you see the impact damage. that is from where she hit officer david tome. he flew approximately it was 150 feet in the air off the roadway. you see the cones under her car. this is where, approximate area where he landed off the roadway. you see his reflective gear. he was wearing reflective gear that day. he was clearly visible to anybody who was paying attention. here's a picture of her makeup bag. we actually found a make up spatter pattern if you want to call it that that existed on the steering wheel and on the car door showing the pattern in which it flew from the, top makeup powder and am indicator. - aply katetor. placeally, ultimate goal we want people like officer david tome alive and he would be except for three things. joanna seibert would have

slowed down, didn't tailgate and most importantly, put the cell phone and makeup away. pay attention to the roadway. that is how simple it is. that is how simple it would be for officer david tome to be alive today. there is nothing more heartbreaking to take a look at this. they did this for officer tome, the police officers there working on crash site after his body was placed in a body bag and taking him up off the road. his colleagues gave him one final salute. he died in the line of duty. he didn't have to die as everybody does not need to die. we need to do what we can to enhance our ability to truly prosecute these cases, especially our recidivists. we need laws that directly address this. i know i'm out of my time. so thank you very much. >> last panelist, panelist is sergeant jerry oberdorf of the pennsylvania state police.

oberdorf served 23 years in the pennsylvania state police and 18 years on the road and patrol surf. he holds the rank of sergeant in the bureau of patrol. sergeant oberdorf, i invite your remarks. >> good morning. i apologize. the last -- >> sorry. your microphone's not hot. >> oh, good morning. i apologize. i got a little choked up with mr. barker's dissertation on the last story. i wear the same uniform that the troopers were that were standing by the roadside there. i attended the funeral. it was a horrible situation. okay. nonetheless, i'm here to talk to you today about challenges of law enforcement regarding enforcing texting, driving laws that are now in place

in pennsylvania. prior to march 82012, the pennsylvania law enforcement community had no law on the books that we could use to enforce cell phone usage, texting, or basically any type of distracted driving per se. the only sections that we could use in the pennsylvania vehicle code that would be applicable were careless driving, reckless driving and possibly driving on roadways lanes or traffic, meaning failing to stay within a single lane. i don't have a lot of statistics or anything. i'm here to give you the field experience part of it, and that is what i'm going to do. back in 1949 i was assigned to the carlisle station near harrisburg. i investigated, i was called to investigate a crash. the investigation led to the information that a driver of a van who was from spain and was currently working in a pizza shop, reached over for a piece of pizza. nothing to do with texting

or phone or anything. reached over for a piece of pizza as he approached a stop sign. the roadway that was intersecting had no traffic control device and did not have to slow down or stop at that intersection. as the gentleman reached over for a slice of pizza he realized there was a stop sign. by then it was too late. he went through the intersection. hit a mid '80s ford thunderbird and killed a 19-year-old pregnant female in the passenger seat. at that time, there was real, there was no real aggressive enforcement in distracted driving in fatalities. long story short i went to the district attorney's office, reviewed the case. i had to call the family up and tell them that the man is only getting a summary traffic citation with a $25 fine for killing their daughter. another tough incident for me to be involved in. just as late as last year, 2011, prior to the new texting law coming into effect, i was on routine

patrol on midnight shift about 1:30 in the morning. i see a vehicle traveling south on a two-lane road. i'm following it. it is completely all over the road, crossing the double yellow line almost to the beryl on the opposite of the road in on coming lane. fortunately it was not a high trafficked road at that time of night and i had to find a place to pull this person over which took me possibly two piles. in that two-mile stretch this vehicle crossed center line approximately 10 times, several times completely in the oncoming lane. i thought to myself wow, i've got a good drunker who. i pulled the vehicle over. you know where this is going. i get up there is one occupant. a 17-year-old female. her phone is laying on the passenger seat and it is all lit up. and i said, i introduced myself. asked if she had been drinking. she said no. what caused you to be all over the road tonight? she said i was texting and hung her head and said i was tegsing. at that point no law in

effect regarding cell phone usage while driving. ended up giving her one for careless driving. $25 fine plus costs on driving roadways rain of traffic for leaving her lane of travel. those are the things we dealt with prior to march 8th of 2012. march 8th of 2012,, pennsylvania vehicle code title 75 section 3316.a prohibiting text based communication went into effect. unfortunately it was proposed in one way and until the public comment period and all the challenges and everything are said and done the law that went into effect will be very difficult for law enforcement officers to enforce. and eventually prosecution by the district attorney's office there. they will have the same challenges that we do. unfortunately, unfortunately

it's what we have to deal with. in in pennsylvania we have what's called reasonable suspicion is necessary to conduct a traffic stop. if i pull up beside a vehicle and i see someone with a phone in their hand and they're manipulating the phone that is not reasonable suspicion to say, hey that person is texting. i could pull the person over and say i wasn't texting? i was looking at photographs to look up number to call my number. a million things they can explain that situation away. mere ma nip mission of a cell phone is not going to be enough for me to pull them over. if we get weaving erratic driving, stopping and slowing and so forth we could add those things together to build the reasonable suspicion necessary to pull them over. there will be more difficulty i will discuss upon the question and answer period. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> chairman hersman, that concludes the introductions and opening remarks. i turn the panel over to you and the board for questioning. >> member sumwalt.

>> thank you. mr. murphy, i understand you are the immediate past chairman of the governor's highway safety association. >> yes, sir. >> thank you for your service there. what is the ghsa's position on whether or not states should have cell phone laws? >> we do support a texting ban. we haven't adopted support of a handheld ban as of yet. >> now, i'm under the i am mr. eggs that sometime last summer the ghsa came out and said that they were not going to recommend states adopt, i think it was texting bans because there was were data that were showing that the fatality rates from the ihs was showing that fatalities were not decreasing. so what's the story behind that? >> i'm, my understanding that that was more about the

handheld ban. we supported a texting ban i believe for the last couple of years. but the hand healed ban, we'll be looking at that very closely in the next six months. we will, we will revisit that policy. >> did you come out and actually say that states should not adopt these hand-held bans? >> no. we just, we were just waiting for a little bit more studies and a little bit more information. i think we're ready, like i said, to take a hard look at it again. >> can you explain what the situation was that i described that accurately? that the insurance institute for highway safety had found that laws banning texting and cell phone use were not reducing crash risk? >> in terms of what, in terms of what their study said, the ihs? >> i guess really though the fact is that you wanted to

hold off until more data were available? >> yes, yes. >> okay, senator starr, so, what should policymakers do? here we've got a situation where, maybe there is some data that show that the fatality rates are not going down with the implementation of these laws. so what should policymakers do? it's like, you could say that, that, heroin use does not go down because there are laws against that but as a policymaker do you just sit back and say we're not going to do anything? or as a policymaker do you say it is incumbent upon us to draw that line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in the way we draw that line is we pass laws? >> so, i'm hard-pressed to answer that question on behalf of all legislators. i would say that's a broad question but i would say that as it relatings to the state that i'm from, that

was the decision that we made is that we banned all handheld devices. no texting, no talking on the phone, no handheld whatsoever. ultimately i believe that's a the decision that legislators are going to make across this country and they're in the process of grappling with those issues right now. what you see happens in most states is a ban on texting because the data is most clear on texting. i believe that the data will help drive this conversation at the state legislative level and, you know, that's a big piece of this conversation. in addition to that, what we've seen is the education works and you heard from the examples here on this panel. i think you saw, heard that discussion in the earlier panel. you've seen that example in other cases of high bay safety -- highway safety and i think seatbelt is the most recent example of that. so those are places i think

that is important. >> thank you. i realize you can't answer on behalf of all 50 state ledgetures but i'm curious, i think that you mentioned that you went for handheld cell phone bans and you did not go to hands free, is that correct? >> in oregon hands-free is allowed. >> i'm wondering about that. i'm wondering if hands-free is a false sense of security there? earlier we heard testimony that there hands-free and handheld is there is no difference. that's what worries me people think they are solving the problem and they're really not and it is that false sense of security. what are your thoughts? >> mentioned that in my, in my comments about one of the hurdles that legislators have to overcome because that piece of data is available to legislators and so they say, why would we ban handheld cell phone use when it is just as bad as, allowing hands-free? so in oregon we made that

choice. as i talk to my colleagues, legislators across the country, those are issues they're grappling with. we're also talking about fines and fees and what not on drivers and to a certain extent legislators want to make sure that they're making appropriate policy choices there. >> and i want to make sure of that as well. when we have a next panel after lunch we'll talk about what companies are doing to try and to improve safety and i'm i don't want to see two waves of this. go through a period of 10 years where we pass the handheld bans and think we've solved the problem and then 10 years down the road realize we still have an epidemic problem. so anyway, i'm out of the time and i appreciate your answers, thank you. >> thank you. >> we have another oregonian, member weener. >> yes, another oregonian. thank you for coming out to this wonderful sunny area. i think i know what you left. >> yes, no question. >> yes.

actually, senator, could you just give me a feeling for how many states have banned texting? >> i believe the number as of the end of last year was 35. there might be a handful of states, apparently, pennsylvania has passed a law this year as well. so, at least 35 have banned texting. >> as far as handheld cell phones, that's a lesser number, it not? >> looks like nine states and the district of columbia have passed handheld bands. >> and hands-free? >> and i don't have that piece of information. >> but that's a smaller number yet? >> i'm sure it is. >> now, in terms of a traffic stop how, how does the, in law enforcement, how do you determine whether or not you have somebody texting?

probably sergeant oberdorf? >> i would be glad to discuss that. as our law is written it will be very difficult. i will give you a prime example. if i'm going on a two-lane highway traveling the same direction, we'll pick interstate 81 which is very popular in our area, if i'm traveling south an route 81, there's another vehicle in the right lane, i'm in the left lane and as i'm passing this vehicle i see that person looking at their phone and again, manipulating the phone in some fashion, that is not enough for a police officer to pull some is one over in our state. i'm going to have to have other indicators. maybe a long period of manipulating the phone, two or three minutes without holding it up to the ear. and actually engaging in a voice conversation. possibly maybe that vehicle will drift over towards me. this is all well and good, if i'm in marked unit, that person will already see me and they're already

distracted and soon as they see me they will stop. there is my chance to develop enough reasonable suspicion. the one instance we may have a good chance would possibly be a crash. in other words a crash in lancaster county, where a 20-year-old female, i believe it was killed and they have preliminary information that she was texting prior to the crash. that is going to take some investigative effort, possibly a search warrant to get the phone data and see if they can verify closer to the time of the crash if she was actually texting. >> thank you. dr. chaudhary in the four ways you did in connecticut, how did you determine in that activity who was texting, who was talking? what was going on? >> as far as the talking, i

mean it's all observational. so we had observers on the side of the road looking into vehicles. if somebody had a phone to their ear, we coded it as handheld talking. i used the term texting with quotes around it because the proper term should probably be manipulating. so i can't be sure whether they were dialing, checking their e-mail, using a gps devries on their phone. so texting is, not the best term for that. manipulating the phone would be a better term. but if they had the phone in their hand we considered that manipulating as far as our definition. >> how narrowly are the laws written? is that texting versus manipulating, a difference? >> i'm basing this on my memory which may not be accurate but i believe at least in connecticut that's enough for them to, to issue

a citation. if the phone's in your hand, that's pretty much it. so it's, i believe it's written quite differently from the pennsylvania law. >> a question for mr. barker. how many of these citations actually go to prosecution? >> well in terms of the, if you're talking about the new texting ban, this is so brand new that we have not seen any flow its way through. and quite frankly if we run this consistently with how other traffic safety laws work they will not wind up being more than people mailing in their fines. and this is the danger of what we see as the way that the current laws are structured. in getting to read and evaluate numerous driving records, unfortunately we get to do it after people have racked up a number of

duis or they killed people in other ways. you see a pattern of dangerous driving behavior that they have been engaging in for a while. now because they're summary offenses they will more likely or not never hit a prosecutor the. they will be taken care of for instance, in pennsylvania, i know many other states are like this. they will go ahead and write their check. mail it in and then they're done. and then if there is a point system maybe they accumulate enough to get a point exam. if their texting or cell phone ban counts against points, maybe at some point in time they will get their license suspended quite frankly has not been a great way to stop the repeat offenders. this 20% if we go by the 100 car naturalistic study they're out there doing 80% of the crash, near crash aspects what we've seen and our personal review of our killers i call them killers because that's what they do. we don't get them until, as

you heard sergeant oberdorf say, yeah, lancaster getting to go ahead and do one now because somebody died. so if we're really looking to prevent, get us involved in the system and have the system treat this conduct, this dangerous driving conduct similar how we do for dui treatment courts, drug treatment courts, other aspects. develop programs part of a mandatory education aspect. we need recidivism laws to get these repretty -- repeat offenders up in our sphere. without them -- we're not talking about jailing everybody. that's not what i'm talking about at all but we can't do anything truly to stop the most dangerous offenders. yeah, we'll knock out the same people we could have with an ard, that was first time offender d.u.i. we know that is not stopping that 25% repeat offender in the area. same thing with dangerous drivers. we know we're not stopping

them, mail them into a mdj and never hit our world and we can never educate and change the pattern of behavior. >> thank you, mr. barker. member rosekind. >> the panels have been great. different perspectives and different expertise and views the world here. so i'm curious, if each of you, we're going to start at the nonprofessional for this one, i'm curious if each can identify the three elements you think need to go into model legislation to deal with this issue. we'll keep it quick because i have some other questions and i'm just feeling little -- as you're thinking for a moment. each of you from your world view what you think are three critical elements that would go into some model legislation. as i say, we'll start, he is already drafting legislation on this end. start with the sergeant, if that's okay. >> okay. first and foremost i believe in pennsylvania, california sound like they have a decent handle on things out there with their stat.

pennsylvania number one, we need a more definitive law regarding texting. it states right not law, subsection c, that we can not seize the phone because of what we've seen. to go a little further, if i do develop enough reasonable suspicion to pull this vehicle over, now i go up, i'm still kind of in investigatory mode. i go up, i'm say i'm sergeant oberdorf from the pennsylvania state police. what were you doing with your cell phone. if they say go pound sand. i'm not going to tell you. i have no right to seize the phone. would you mind handing your phone to me, so i can look. again they're boeing to tell me go pound sand. another problem with the language in our section is that if the device is an integrated device, it is an exception. so will be attorneys out there that will challenge that language. i see this cop coming and i'm texting guess what i'm going to plug my charger in

and i integrated my, my wireless device into my car and that's an exception. the general public doesn't know this yet but it's coming. so that would be first and foremost in my mind. >> great. give me three. >> i'm sorry? >> that's all right. no. already, those were great. keep mr. barker in a box of three, go. >> okay. first, recidivism law where if you have at least two or more summary offenses from a dangerous driving classification, that would include, running gamut of your speedings to distracted drivings, to your careless drivings, reckless drivings, summary offenses they become misdemeanors or higher. misdemeanors of second degree or higher so we can meaningfully do something with the individuals before they kill. that would be priority number one. number two would be to draft similar to our dui laws put

into place different educational rehabilitation components that would go alongwith those recidivism laws so there is mandatory vail wages and counseling for improper drivers to change their behavior. the third thing i would add is, a penalty enhancement for those who are engaged in distracted driving for all the other catch-all type of laws. homicide by vehicle, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, reckless driving. trying to go ahead and define the nuance of one specific type of distractor is going to be virtually impossible. but we can establish it and prove it across the board and if we can utilize our general careless and reckless crimes with an enhancement based upon destracks i think we could get more use and implementation out of those and lead to more consequence for engaging in that kind of driving. >> all right. >> i think any law needs to

be primarily enforced. well-defined in terms of what it allows and what it doesn't and the consequences need to be strict enough where it overrides the perception of this is just the cost of doing business. so, if i get a tickket i will pay it and walk away. well, i just cut a deal where more than made up for that. >> i would say to enact handheld bans. i think in california we have reduced crashes and overall cell phone use has actually gone down since we had our handheld bans. handheld bans con be enforced much are easily than texting bans. i agree they should be for primary enforcement. the fines need to pay have to be meaningful. ours is $150. can't be $20. i don't think that works. >> last to be clear, oregon

has an example where we passed a law couple years ago had an exemption you could use the phone for business purposes. basically meant every phone call was for business purposes. law enforcement didn't enforce the law. we fixed that last year. education one is important. and that's either through your transportation safety division or perhaps having, i know that we did this in oregon for safety belts. if you've got a ticket for safety belt could take an hour class basically where you learned the physics why safety belts are important. i will tell you that changed behavior right quickly. similar process here could help as well. >> great, thank you. >> thank you, chairman. >> thank you. this has been fascinating. sound like we have kind of a circular problem we can't get lbl shun because we don't have enough data but we're hearing from sergeant oberdorf we can't get data because legislation doesn't let him do it. i don't know where to start

with the circle. what would the ideal law look like that would help you enforce against distraction by, you know these electronic devices. trying to take it beyond texting, ideally what would you need in order to generate the data senator starr needs in order to dot legislation? you understand my question. >> where is the starting point? >> yes. >> unfortunately i do think we need date to show we need some type of general distracted driving section where we do have more reasonable suspicion. if i'm following someone, the mere fact that they have their hand in their, phone in their hand and are manipulating it for two miles should be enough to pull someone over. and i think we need to statistics to back that up. yes, that is distracted driving. whether i can prove whether you're texting or whether you're just pushing buttons and your phone is not even on it's a distraction. that's where we need to start the i think we need to have a broader language and numerous sections that will

allow us to develop what we need to pull someone over and, when we pull someone over we want to have enough to get a conviction and that's what is going to be required before we pull them over. something broader that we can stop them for. >> okay. and while i'm talking to you, sergeant oberdorf, i appreciate that answer. let me ask you another question. law enforcement in their cars have been using radios for years and talking all the time on their radio while driving. is there anything we can learn from experience to help with distraction from electronic devices? it is successful experience for law enforcement. what can we learn from that to reduce hazards for joe public? >> if i understand your question, you're saying the police have been using -- >> talking on the radio while driving. >> talking on police radios while driving. unfortunately there are a lot of necessary evils in our job while driving a patrol car. we receive extensive

training how to operate emergency vehicle. we try to keep further distances back to allow for that distraction that may cause us to come up on someone quicker than the normal driver. >> i'm not asking the question in negative way. i'm looking in positive way. there must be a wealth of experience that has been acquired by our highway law enforcement officers that can come into this equation to help us make it less unsafe. >> i think the only thing i can say it is awareness. we have to be aware we have these distractions. we have computers in our car, a normal driver in pennsylvania is not allowed to operate a computer in our vehicle. our regulations say we can not use it while we're driving. it makes noises. it sends messages. it will be human reaction and you will glance at it. as a supervisor i tell all the young people, all young troopers coming out you have to minimize distractions driving this patrol car. you're thinking about call you're going to. well the civilian is thinking about the event they're going to or the house they're going to or friend they're going to see

or the movie and i tell my kids, two kids college age you have to minimize your distractions. i don't know that there is anything unique that law enforcement can say other than minimize your distractions. keep that safe distance. and as much as possible keep your attention on the road ahead of you. >> thank you. another question is, mr. barker made an interesting point about the recidivists. maybe i'm the best person to ask this to is mr. murphy because you might have the best per tech sieve on the state laws because of governor's highway experience. what is the state issues that mr. barker is concerned about and rightfully so? >> vice chairman, i'm not really sure. i haven't really only, don't know too much about that one to be honest with you. >> that sound like something that emerging from experience that has int yet reached legislative arena we are looking at more with drink driving for example,

same resid vist issue. thank you. the connecticut, moving to the connecticut and syracuse experience i think the slide said you weren't sure whether the reduction was sustained after the wave finished. do you have any, there is no late data on that whether there's on up tick again after the enforcement wave? >> it is actually mixed. between the first wave and the second wave, the decrease was maintained which was very exciting. between the second and third waves had you ever, it shot back up, the rates went pretty high. and then third to fourth brought them down below where they were at any other point during the evaluation. so what was difference between one and two and two and three? novelty may have been in effect. the extent of the earned media may have differed.

i just can't say exactly what it was. >> okay. >> just, your earlier question, connecticut does increase their fines for repeat, repeat offenders. so i don't know if that is helpful. >> we heard that for california as well. thank you very much. >> my question, goes to you all with respect to what i'm hearing. this conversation as far as laws and enforcement seems very much focused on tegsing and also -- texting and also handheld devices. i would like a little bit of feedback from you all, certainly some of you have experiential time with this california in your case, several years under your belt but also on the legislative pushback and enforcement side dealing how you actually fault someone for these things. i'm not hearing about the hand free at all in this --

hands-free at all in this conversation here. i want to make sure i understand as far as is it a disconnect between the information, senator starr that's available that people think somehow that hands-free is safer than handheld? or is it the problem, if we have enforcement, the challenge of it's hard to write a law where you enforce a hand free. so can you give me a little bit of freed back on that and what seems to me is, everyone gets texting. some people get handheld and others are getting the hands-free. where is this level of maturity here and why the receptiveness towards the first in the continuum but harder at the top? >> well, i believe that legislators are responsive to their voters and quite honestly -- >> maybe their own needs? >> maybe their own needs, no doubt. and a lot of, a lot of our

constituents spend a lot of time in their vehicles and, you know, i think that there is a common, probably misunderstanding that hands-free is safer. and so that's, that's a reason that we haven't addressed the hands-free issue as dangerous yet. and i quite honestly believe that if legislators at this point were to move if that direction, it would be a very difficult cell with the average driver, the average voter quite honestly. >> how about on the enforcement side? how difficult is it to enforce a hands-free type prohibition? >> well, we're just dealing with the actual texting law now. so we have no experience with that. i guess if you have multiple occupants in a vehicle, and again, i pull up next to that vehicle and 81 southbound and i see them flapping at the gums as they say, how am i to determine

if they're actually using a hands-free phone or talking to their passenger? i see that as a challenge. i'm going to kind of combine the vice chairman and the chairman's last two issues, thinking about the question you proposed regarding radio use an. there we're not actually manipulating a device. we're so used to grabbing that of the handle and pulling it up and using it. we can keep our focus out ahead of it. is it a distraction? again we're going back to minimization. we'll minimize our distraction. i don't have statistics versus hands-free versus handheld. maybe the hands-free is safer i don't know. i have guess a hands-free system in a perfect world may be better than actually holding the phone in your hand, manipulating it making the call. unfortunately that will call money and vehicles. not everybody has the money to go hands-free. not everybody has the opportunity or equipment to go hands-free depending what vehicle they're driving.

again there will be a lot of issues that are going to dictate that. >> okay. how about, as we have seen, 35 states have texting bans and so i'm interested in you all, and you have in your experience, do you think that the texting bans actually create a more dangerous type of hidden texting where people are actually, having more contortions to actually text without other people seeing them? is there a negative effect of passing some of these laws? >> the, there can be, absolutely. we do see and one of the things we get reported on a wide scale, is that individuals that take extra steps to hide their cell phones. put them and contort them into different places. i think, though that the overall danger about how we've continuously talked about texting ban, texting ban, texting ban is, one thing i did mention in my beginning is, i have one

hands-free fatality prosecution under my belt already. and the reason why it happened, the person was engaged in the discussion with his wife where they were more focused on the conversation than, that there was a red traffic light. especially when you're talking about commercial motor vehicle where you have even less, margin of error there is nothing you can do. the danger, the true danger in these focusing on texting, and what i fear for pennsylvania, is that by keeping the discussion so narrow, it's not only, everybody will try to figure out how to get around the latest law. you know, you will have a portion that will try to do that. especially if they think all they have to do is pay a fine and it is the cost of doing business. the bigger danger is, now we've narrowed the focus of discussion and are thinking we're accomplishing more than we actually are. there are a lot of different ways to drive your vehicle dangerously and many ways to be distracted.

and if we narrowed the focus of our view so much in our discussion, we'll get a false sense of security that then tenure 10 years down the road after many deaths that is the real place we'll collect the data. vice chairman, you asked about data collection? the data's there but it is all on dead bodies and that is the unfortunate thing. if we want to prevent that data from ever occurring we need to always widen our margin, widen our scope and keep our discussion broad and focused in that way. >> you raise the issue of commercial vehicles, i see a friend, steven garcia in the audience from mscsa, and they passed a federal ban when it comes to texting or operating a handheld device for commercial drivers and the penalties for commercial driver, violating the ban, is $2750 per violation. for up to, for the driver and for the company,

$11,000. is that the cost of doing business? >> depends. i've seen some companies, i've done quite a few commercial motor vehicle fatalities too and i know quite a few companies depending what they need to do, same way they violate, you know, driver logs, fatigue, different aspects like that, it is going depend how reputable your company is and what they determine as a cost of doing business. quite frankly, my view has always been this. my view from feeling with the -- dealing with the amount of cases that you have, unless you have a technique to let us get somebody under our thumb and not be able to write a check, we can not go ahead and truly change the scope of the cost benefit analysis. and then impose the education requirement. i'm not talking about criminalizing everything. i think that whenever we talk about that there's a

fear, oh, here comes the prosecutor again. he loves throwing people in jail, sticking it to folks and criminalizing all conduct. that is not the case. but what we're seeing is, if the cost benefit equation always just deals with dollars and cents, and does not deal with something as meaningful follow-up, meaningful education which can only be obtained by sentences that actually have tails to to them and require them to appear in court, appear before a judge, appier before a prosecutor and have meaningful education, be it a component in whatever form, diversionary, nondiversionary, whatever form, we can not meet the heart of this problem especially with recidivists. >> thank you. member sumwalt. >> i do have a follow-up what the chairman was asking. and, mr. murphy, when member rose kooin asked each of the panelists what suggested laws they would put in place and i believe you replied, a handheld ban, is that

correct? >> yes. >> given the date that we've discussed today, why would you not say an outright ban on cell phones? why do you limit it to handheld? >> i just don't think as the senator said, i just don't think we're ready for that. this is really more of a political issue. and i don't know, right now, we don't have any state that has a total, total ban. i don't even know if there is any legislation that has been drafted on a total ban, senator, do you know? >> no. go ahead. >> i'm sorry. >> no, this is the big myth, folks. and this is what worries me. because, we have people that think they're doing the right things. they think they're solving the problem. they're going to vote on something and slap their hands, said, we took care of that problem. but they're not. and that's what worries me. and we've got people that are in safety-related positions that are advocating a handheld ban

when that's not doing anything. if you're going to be in a safety-related position you've got to take the position that we've got to ban cell phones period while being used in a car. [applause] now, there's a good paper out there, and i'm not saying this, i have found this to be a very good paper. it is out on the table i believe it is, national safety council and it talks about it is the cognitive distraction. it is not the fact that you've necessarily got this thing up to your ear even though having that extra appendage is the distraction. it is cognitive distraction and the data are showing that there is not a significant difference between handheld and hands-free. if we're really going to make a difference, we've got to accept that.

is that correct? senator? is that correct, mr. murphy? you're in a safety position. you don't have to worry about the politics of it. >> i would say right now handheld bans help us get to where maybe you want to go but to not have a handheld ban because we can't get to the ultimate, i'm not, i'm not really sure about that. >> it is a false sense of security, sir. senator, that you mentioned that there are, there are arguments. how do we counter these claims, well we don't have enough data, it is an invasion of privacy? correct me if i'm wrong here, if you have a driver's license it is a right, not a privilege. associated with that privilege, when you execute the privileges of that license you are agreeing to

abide by the laws and restrictions and regulations associated with that. is that correct? >> that is correct. i believe that part of the challenge to going to a complete cell phone ban is the enforcement piece as we've heard. how does enforcement, law enforcement know when someone is talking whether they're singing alongwith the radio or talking on a hands-free device. i think that is big challenge. i think ultimately, technology, will solve this problem. whether it is technology that, someone can, through an independent company or technology that's mandated by congress to be included in vehicles, i think over in the long term, technology will be the issue that helps to solve this issue. for legislators as well, emotion is important. you know you can get legislators to do, to pass legislation based on emotional testimony from folks that have been harmed by distracted drivers.

and we shouldn't negate that piece of this information conversation as well. >> thank you very much. >> member weener. >> yeah, i'd like to go back to, kind of the discussion we had at the beginning of the last panel and that was the data upon which we decide, we use to make decisions about what to focus on. and i guess this is a question for sergeant oberdorf. when you arrive on an accident scene, how do you determine whether distraction has been a cause and, following that, how do you decide what kind of distraction is in the particular accident? >> first off there are many things that can cause a crash. distracted driving number one. speed, alcohol, drugs, so on and so forth. the list goes on and on.

the first thing we'll look at is the physical evidence. you either got 100 feet of skid marks, no skid marks on the on set end. no skid marks somebody coming up to intersection and blowing a red light would mean there was something going on they did not react to that red light. was it a medical condition? was it texting? was it reaching for that piece of pizza? we don't know and that's why we have to investigate and that's why some of these are very difficult to take to any serious level of prosecution. we look for witness statements, statements of the driver, if they survived. statements of the other vehicle that they hit. it's an investigatory process where we have to eliminate certain things and eventually focus on one particular area. and then take it from there. >> so in the process of going through all of those possible causes, you're trying to document the cause of this particular accident.

how difficult is it to make that particular determination stick in a conviction? >> well, again, you have some scenes where the only thing you have is physical evidence. physical evidence never lies if it is presented properly and can go a long ways but it is great when you have something to corroborate that evidence such as, i was following that vehicle up to the red light. they were going 10 miles in excess of the posted speed limit and there was absolutely no breaking prior to -- braking prior to entering that intersection and they were reaching over to pick up a phone. that is the best-case scenario. so, i'm sorry, kind of lost track of your question? >> i was just trying to explore in a sense, the bigger question is how valid is the data when it comes to looking at what was the cause of distracted-related accidents but then it's really associated with that

is the issue once you've made that determination and you've made it on scene through an investigation which may have continued after the scene, the question is, how solidly can you make it stick? in other words if it's texting you can probably, well, as you described you can see if the unit has been lit up, if you're right at the scene. >> sure. >> that's where mr. barker's office comes in very handy. we'll confer with the district attorney. often times we'll bring a district attorney out to the scene as we're doing our accident investigation, they're also looking at what are we going to need to prosecute this case in addition to what we're looking at to prosecute the case? because ultimately they're going to be the ones to present this case to a jury if it goes that far. so we work hand in hand with the district attorney's office at serious crash scenes and i guess maybe i can turn it over to mr. barker and he can take that side of it.

>> most of our involvement in pennsylvania of course deals with the true reconstruction of the crash and involves with serious bodily injury and fatality scenarios. that's when most of our situations occur. a lot of times these are very little eyewitness testimony cases. if an officer is lucky enough to observe or some other citizen is lucky it see, truly what was going into a vehicle, that's great. but a lot of times these are post-crash scenarios where we don't have that. search and seizure laws do not allow us to pick up the phones, turn them on and go through them. in pennsylvania we can not do that what we would need are search warrants to go had and go into the phones and then get the data. we need to get all the cell phone records. do comparisons on those and then eventually you're going to need an expert in human factors. and we're trying to encourage our collision reconstructionist to get more expertise in the area of human factors because that's where really this

area of, like the data that you heard previously from the first panel talking about. that human factors data. jurors need to hear and understand some of that. we know and i know from personal experience and other prosecutors know as well, juries understand certain things up to a certain point. and for instance, when we talk about what makes the impression difference between texting and talking? well it's more visual for a juror to say i will have tough time doing something if i'm sitting there manipulating and looking away. but i have talked many other times. how is that impacting me the same way? that requires education. and we have to educate juries which requires our law enforcement officers to get more expertise, mainly our collision reconstructionists and, many times to have to call in outside witnesses which also costs money. and quite frankly, now, our office, my boss, i love the fact that he has always given us the green light to go ahead and spend the money

on expert. we have people who have died. let's do it. but when you're talking about smaller counties, rural counties, very low budgets, and it's very popular right now, to go ahead where literally we're seeing in the newspapers all the time about, hey, we've got to make a cost benefit analysis. do we go ahead and increase some taxes or do we reduce the number of law enforcement and firefighters out on the street? well that impacts our budgets and who we can bring in and what we can do. but for the defendant, many times, they will petition the court or there will be if especially if they're private, they will bring in their expert to go ahead and try to manipulate the data and manipulate human factors. so that's what goes into proving these cases. they are extremely complex. a distracted driving homicide by vehicle prosecution is about as complex a case as you can get out there. give me a straightforward, shoot them up any day of the week. i can prep that in two days. this type of case takes

months. >> thank you. >> member rosekind. >> so, this is a question for any of you but i don't want to hear from all of you. keep it tight. but i want to go to the data issue which we're seeing a lot of studies trying to look at crash reports and relate them to the accident reports from police. there is clearly an issue here what gets coded, how it's identified. the databases et cetera, we see this across many different areas. give me the fix. clearly garbage in, garbage out, we already know that. we have challenges correlating the stuff. how do we fix the data input? that is such a critical point trying to relate these things? anybody have a fix for that? sir? >> again from the field experience, our state dictates what goes on a crash report. first and foremost, there's a law on the books stating,

our department of transportation will create the report for investigating crashes. from there, we can have our own regulations what else we put in the narrative and diagram and so forth but all the checked boxes they're collecting for stats, is dictated by the state itself. so it's got to start with the state to determine what information they want to recover from each crash scene. >> looking at fix with all 50 states making sure the reports, one have the appropriate boxes on them and two the officers no know what they're looking and three, as you were saying they have the ability to get the data they need to put in there, right? >> correct. . .

and it just seems to me, listening to the previous panel, that members, some do a direct job. is the difference between hands-free and hand-held? no. the risk is increased. so i am curious if there is anything beyond the safety argument about this that actually justifies not banning personal electronic devices? i keep hearing the political, the emotional. i have not heard cost yet. that usually comes up to bat that if you keep it in the safety realm, do we have any reason, is there any data that says, no, don't go for a total

ban? not good to stump the panel. >> well, i will take a flyer at one thing. that flyer is this. if that means we go ahead and have a total ban and we stopped there, then yeah we are going to have a problem because when i sit back and realize in 10 years that the people that are going to ignore the ban and cut the check and i see people coming through my office as prosecutors do who are dying from the conduct and yes that would be a problem. and overall, that is where, as we have seen from the field, when we talk about the frustrations with things that we have heard, is that so many times with legislation and i'm not trying to be critical of the role of the legislature are going know how difficult it is to navigate things are and we appreciate them being our allies, but a lot of times it comes without piecemeal and where there's a sense of satisfaction upon saying look,

we cleared one hill, yet we have got a mountain behind it, and that is where the frustration -- than we have artificial discussions on what was the cost, what was the benefit when we haven't really done all the steps, really analyze the data to its conclusion, really put it together in a way that it needs to. we have become very compartmentalized rather than interacting globally, and driving is a global event. i mean, all laws are global on a continuum. but driving especially as a global event. people who are committing one type of dangerous behavior are going to commit another type and we pretty much know it. there may be an exception or two out there but the ones who want to do it will do it so is there danger? yes come the dangers will become self-satisfied and not deliver the full goods. >> i have to ask you to shorten your answers, please. >> of that is the case, then we will have a problem. >> unfortunately i'm going to stop and move this along so i'm

going to close here. when he made his recommendation we highlighted the nhtsa approach which requires education, strong laws and high high disability enforcement. the discussion of areas coming around to technology being added to that so that you have a relatively set, whole set of different approaches basically to deal with the issue but it starts with the discussion here legislatively, is you know what is the ban need to be in not letting, what we don't know if cedric driving, sort of the tail wagging the dog here and all of us are trying to make sure we are lined up on the safety side saying it starts with strong laws, education, high visibility enforcement in this case probably technology as well and later we can talk more. >> thanks, chairman. >> i would just like to touch briefly on the issue i don't think i've heard about yet which is primary versus secondary and i'm curious first of all the pennsylvania texting law from march 8, 2012 is a primary or secondary? >> do you's primary. i believe, was introduced as a

secondary law i believe and that was one could change that was made from the time it was proposed at the time he came into law. >> the reason i'm asking is because i'm hearing a lot of debate about that issue, primary versus secondary from the standpoint of targeted enforcement and of course what is happening in stanford florida's going to feel that to be somewhat but i'm just wondering the thoughts any of you have on targeted enforcement and the way it may affect primary versus secondary. anybody who might have information on that. >> i think california is also primary vice chairman and i think it's very important that they do enact, that the law be for primary, for the obvious reasons. >> i think this is a situation where the data will help, as you have information that shows that primary enforcement and secondary enforcement and what that means ultimate his life saved will drive just like seatbelts.

>> i think using seatbelts as an example, the data so far does not show that having a primary laws lead to any sort of uneven ticket. i wouldn't expect cell phones to be any different. >> in the interest of time i will cut it off there. thanks. >> i would like to thank the panel because i know we are getting tight on time. you were all asked here because you have expertise in because you all have been leaders in many areas, and so i do want to recognize that you all have been very successful in certain areas. we are trying to get from you know, a baseline level of not much, to getting to something where we are calm pushing things and i think when we are trying really to make societal change like this, that there is an understanding that it happens slowly and it happens over time, and part of the pressure is not

necessarily on any of you individually but the pressure is on all of us collectively. it is at our dinner table, making decisions about how we are going to behave, how our family is going to behave. it is in the workplace. it's about putting a ban on your employees and the people who work for you, about what expectations are and performance behind the wheel. yes, it's about what the local law enforcement will do and what is does this they do and what are the state parties and what are the legislative priorities? but one thing that is not going to solve this problem, all of us have to work together to try to change the attitude. i think mr. murphy we very much appreciate what california has done, because you have demonstrated, many of the positive things that were actually trying to pull from this debate. you all have done the high visibility enforcement campaign. you all have done the education.

you all have measured the data. you have looked at not only did you write the tickets but were the fatality numbers down and you look at people's attitudes and their behavior. that is important too. i think at the end of the day if one person at a time is changing their behavior, think all of you all contribute to that. sergeant overdorff, i think maybe the most important impact for sure you can have, you were talking about young officers that work for you. it's about that one to one communication and about making those changes. and so mr. barker i definitely heard what you set said about trying to address this. are think our concern is this is so pervasive. it's not just about people who are dangerous drivers. there a lot of people out there who don't have record of violations but they are texting behind the wheel or they are talking behind the wheel and they think the accident is not going to happen to them.

i got a letter yesterday from a woman about 18 and her family that they had counseled many times about not texting, not talking on the phone while she was driving, and this person said, please let me do anything i can to help because this young lady who was was involved in an accident. and do you know what? she didn't kill herself, she killed someone else. and that is tragedy here. it's about people making decisions that impact other people and to have an outcome that they are not anticipating. i think one of the challenges we see here in highway safety is, you can get away with murder. you are behind the wheel, and i think what we are hearing here is, we have got to strengthen the penalties. we have got to strengthen the education. we have got to strengthen the

enforcement. many of the families here who have lost someone, doesn't make any difference if that person intended to take that live or they didn't intend to take that life. that person is gone and we have to figure out as a society a way to get that across to everyone. i have got three young boys. i sure hope when they are behind the wheel, we have got a better handle on this because i don't want to be the mother who receives a call that my child has been killed or have to do with my child having done something that resulted in the death of someone else. we have to deal with this as a society. we are going to have a death count a decade from now and we say we need more studies, we need more data. if we don't do something it's going to be too late. it's going to be too late for somebody in this room or someone in this room that you love. i mean, it's that simple. >> would the u.s. senate on break this weekend, we are

featuring booktv in prime-time here on c-span2.

>> if you think of yourself as a family and if you think of yourself as -- she said when i get a raise at work he is so proud of me and it's like we got a raise, our family got a raise but it's as if she redefined providing to include what her husband does and she had a lot of respect for what her husband was doing. >> one of the greatest experiences was when i got the opportunity to see my senators bob casey and pat toomey and to meet them and talk to them.

>> some leaders like leon panetta talk about how fortunate they are to be financially sound because we are not financially sound devoting money to national defense is going to be worth it because we are not going to have any money to devote to it. >> all of my congressman and senator said there is a lot of partisanship going on in congress across the aisle and everybody is cognitive and it makes me wonder if everybody's just saying that but it's not actually happening and they are discussing between what they are saying and what they are actually doing. i had never really thought about that before i came here. >> now more from a recent distracted driving summit hosted

by the national transportation safety board. distracted driving cost 3000 highway deaths according to the latest estimate. safety experts say people's attitudes about distracted driving are changing for the better, but that among teens, distracted driving continues to be the leading cause of death. this is an hour and a half. >> thank you very much to our panelists for joining us and for being here so we can get an on-time start. dr. bruce if you will introduced the third panel. >> good afternoon. i 3 panel looks at countermeasures of changing attitudes and behaviors. we will hear about various national and state education campaigns that target distracted driving and we will look at the waist was this the effectiveness of such campaigns. as we learned this morning and drivers are particularly susceptible to distraction so we will also focus on ways to address that population in these

efforts. our first panelists in this afternoon is mr. jakob nielsen, director of traffic safety advocacy and research for a.a.. mr. nelson is also a mid-american public health leadership fellow alumnus and member of the national public health leadership society. mr. nelson i invite your per -- first presentation. >> thank you dr. bruce. this november will mark 60 years that i've worked in the field of traffic safety, but before that time, i worked in the public health community managing a local health department, working on issues like hiv/aids prevention, responsible sexual behavior, childhood obesity issues, substance abuse issues in those and those types of things. and so i come at the work that we all do in traffic safety with a slightly different perspective. and public health, there is a pretty strict protocol for tackling a health challenge. it starts with defining the

problem and for that we need a very strong date and we have talked a lot about dated today. number two, we identified risk and protective factors and those factors will vary depending on the audience we are trying to reach with our messages. next, we design, evaluate and refine evidence and theory-based intervention. and ensure widespread adoption to relevant audiences. in public health, one of the things we find is most of the interventions designed to impact attitudes in human behavior involved multiple components, sort of an ecological approach to tackling a problemproblem, if you will. so that could include for example public policy, our reach and education and by that i just mean providing information to people about subject matter. and its most simplistic way. and then also community-based programs. these are our components of

multipronged approach in addressing a challenge in the health area that impacts individuals, the way that individuals communicate with one another, organizations and institutions and also society at large. all of those things come together in a changed social norms. is very rare for one, single component intervention to have that type of effect. it's usually a combination of these factors that really motivate people to change the way that they view an issue and the way that they behave relative to this issue. let's not forget just a generation ago, smoking was very common in this country. everyone smoked, athletes, politicians, parents smoking near their children, and medical schools across the united states, physicians would smoked during lectures, teaching the positions of tomorrow. and went public health practitioners for started to

tackle this issue, it seemed impossible to address. everyone told these folks that it was too difficult, it's too much of a challenge. there is no way that we will be able to change social norms relative to this issue. but through policy and the things that have been addressed already, obviously we have made that type of an impact and regardless of your personal views on smoking cessation and bans on smoking in public places, we can't deny the change that we have made in the way society views that issue in the united states. some of the lessons that we have learned three things like the fight against tobacco and smoking in public places are things that in many ways we already know. it's not easy to change social norms and to change attitudes and human behavior. it takes a lot of time to do it. we know that a strong research data and theory-based intervention are really key to supporting our credibility and sustainable change relative to a given health issue.

social and behavioral theory is really important and sort of a cornerstone to what we do in public health regardless of what the issue is. we persuade to reason and motivate through a motion and those people believe the data that we throw at them, we cannot vote to move from that point. so, in other words, facts and statistics, what sticks is the message. it's the way that we frame the discussion around an issue that helps to sort of strike those courts in people. i watched the videos during the break, and i thought a lot of them were really well done. really sort of reminded me why we all do the work that we do in this area. it's easy to get sort of lost in the beltway and the issues that we all work on, so watching those videos was a nice reminder of why we are all doing what we

are doing. one of the other things that we have learned through public health is it's really important to know your target audience. that includes sort of perceived susceptibility and perceived terriers on the issue you are trying to change. these are two of the strongest predictors of success in changing human behavior. communication-based intervention should target segments of audiences. one of the things we learn is we expand the messages that we put out into the world so far is the people that have less impact than we might if we were to focus on a specific target audience. that is something to keep in mind. quickly, i'm going to walk you through the traffic safety culture. so in 2006 the foundation for traffic safety announced a long-term commitment to research education relative to traffic safety culture. i can assure most of the people here are familiar with traffic safety culture and the public

surveys at the foundation conducts each year, but this work really began in 2007 with the publication of 22 papers in and over 378 features from which for themes emerge and these are listed on the screen, complacency and indifference. it really showcases the fact that in the year 2000 -- traffic crashes cost $230 billion per year but we spend in this country less than 1 billion per year to address it. safer vehicles and safer roads are really speaking to for some reason the public seems to demand safer vehicles and seems to accept and demand the government's role in ensuring their infrastructure is safe for us to travel on. traffic safety science, science in quotation marks max speaks to the fact that the vehicle and engineering side of the house we have that rigor in the science

that we applied to changing the way that people travel on our roads and increasing safety. that rigor is lacking relative to behavioral highway safety. variations in traffic safety speaks to the difference between urban to rural and from one issue to the next. drunk driving, areas that we have made a lot in the past. we have a long way to go relative to distraction and finally boosters and barriers that i will get to in the context of our q&a. thank you. >> chairman hersman our second presenter will be doctored dan mcgehee of the university of iowa. dr. said three is the director of vehicle safety research division at the university of iowa public policy center. for several years dr. mcgehee has conducted driving studies among young drivers with a triggered video recorder which provides a unique view into young driver behaviors.

dr. mcgehee i would like to hear your presentation. >> thank you dr. bruce. we will be talking about teen drivers this afternoon, which is yet another unique population within the context of driving. and one thing to consider about not only distraction in general but teen driving in particular is that it has always been one of the most dangerous things. >> can you pull your mic just a little bit closer? >> as driving for teens is one of the most dangerous things and has been for a long time and continues to be a major public health issue. one thing that we sort of think about with our teens and the

population in general is we worry about the vehicle a lot of times and what i've displayed on the screen is to show motor vehicle crashes make up the majority of fatalities within these unintentional injuries. it's the leading cause of death for those in their teenage years. and when you take a look at crash rates over time, they are highly dependent on exposure to driving itself. and so over the last several years where we have seen unemployment issues and a young driver and high fuel prices we actually can see those crash rates and vitality rates go down but as driving increases, then they go up. so why do teens crash relative to their adult counterparts? poor judgment and decision-making is exacerbated by their young age, and there

and experience. this is really the key to developmental issues, practice and so forth are good teams are very sensitive to peer influence and risk-taking. what we see in our crashes is that the more teens on board, the higher the crash rate in general. we also see more risk and device interaction. we will talk more about what we see as group texting. that is when you get a bunch of teens on board they all want to text because it is part of their social network and so forth. causes can vary greatly. they can be intentional and can intensely drive at high. >> but they can also be very naïve as well. all of those combined in essentially reducing safety margins. we also see a big disconnect between driving abilities and pasta man's. we see young drivers essentially

selecting to be distracted, checking that text message as it comes through, right when they are entering a complicated on-ramp and so forth, which you might not see with an adult. they have a lot of difficulty in speed maintenance, passing perception and so forth. really get at the technology part but not good at tester and. as we have heard in some of their testimony today people think they are good multitaskers. teens think they are great multitaskers, but they are really not. they are really experts at operating their devices but not doing that in driving at the same time. one of the trends that is worrisome is really how much more we are texting in the younger populations. what we have here are two good data sources, the pew research center as well as the nielsen group have been very interesting data analyses on text usage and voice usage and what we see here

on the screen right now is an increase in text usage at the end of 2009 and 2010 where we see young women texting is about 3952 text messages a month and voice about 2800 a month. we also see that almost 80% of youth are also active in social networks, which is another area of increased visual manual interaction and interestingly, boys are declining in that group as well. and mobile data usage is increasing. over the last quarter of 2010 to the third quarter of 20 leavitt and increased 266% and that is sort of the download from me social networking, it e-mail app download's and so forth and then males on the side are much more heavy in terms of data users on

those smartphones. so what is promising out there? graduated driver's license systems have been shown to be effective. i know that you all have addressed that in previous hearings. where they essentially provide a protective effect and protective environment where they can learn through experience. practice is really the key for the younger driver. driving without passengers, not late at night, with more supervised driving. we are also seeing feedback technologies, a research we have been doing for the last five years at the university of iowa with a video recorder and coaching technologies have shown to be very effective in reducing the number of safety relevant events. agreements like checkpoints. professor fisher presented earlier this morning a program that he pioneered in risk awareness and perception training. there are number of research

needs as well. we also need in addition to naturalistic driving research we also need to do naturalistic studies on mobile phones as well and this is really critical to understand use patterns not only as they are being used in general but as a driver and a passenger, we need to understand group texting and we need to understand our social communication fabric is essentially changing. we are also seeing many many notifications our phones are buzzing with an update your link to an update to facebook. updates are constantly buzzing through. we need to understand how those contribute to driver distraction and then as jacob mentioned we really need to understand how we can change those social norms more quickly. finally, how do we understand these habits and addictions as they relate to mobile phones wax that is a really big element of understanding how to go forward. thank you. >> thank you dr. mcgehee.

weather presenter will be mr. david subfourteen from the national safety council. mr. subfourteen leads initiatives to reduce deaths and injuries associated with teen driving and distracted driving. before joining usc mr. teeter launched a technology company developing solutions to distracted driving. mr. teeter i look forward to your presentation. >> thank you dr. bruce. i think i have good news to report. i think the business community is maybe leading the way and maybe we can start some culture changes there. a little bit about the national safety council. we are private not-for-profit organization. we were formed by businesses 100 years ago at the turn-of-the-century were people were getting injured at the workplace right and left. we have 20,000 corporate members representing eight employees in the policy decisions we take, the policy positions we take are based on member input. i'm here representing that group. we decided in 2009, based on the

input that we needed to take a stand on distracted driver so he called for national ban on cell phone use while driving. we asked employers to implement policies and asked individuals to put their phones down we recommended legislators pass laws in that regard. i am happy to report we have had a lot of good progress from corporations. and most of those corporations, especially lately as the research has become more available, are putting in total ban policies. policies include all forms of cell phone use, handheld, hands-free integrated systems and nonintegrated systems and doing this after their own review of the research. employers have a history of leadership on these issues. losses seapower requirements for employers long before there was legislation requirement so we think this is consistent with what we have seen in the past. i was surprised when i first got into this a few years ago. i spent my entire career in the business community and this is the second profession for me.

i've been in it for about seven years. i surprised to find out how many companies have policies in place. i will tell you it is much harder to get a list of the policies than we ever dreamed it would be. they are not necessarily forthcoming with information and there's all kinds of different policies. some apply only to certain employee groups and other policies allow hands-free which we don't consider to be a total ban policy but the companies you see on the board are some of the companies we know in this is a representative list of some companies that you have heard of before. some of these companies especially in the oil and gas companies, exxonmobil and shell and gas have had policies in place since maybe 10 years ago. they been in place for a long time. you will see up to the national transportation safety board really respects the leadership on that a couple of years ago when he put in a total ban. you will see up there the california office of public safety and we have mr. murphy on the last panel. his office has been a total ban

policy so there's a role for private employers and a role for federal employers at all levels in this. this is what a typical policy looks like. they aren't real typical. they are pretty straightforward. what you see up there is one of the companies that is just on the board, a fortune 50 company in the policy has been in place for years. what they say is you can't use a cell phone while driving and handheld, hands-free for any surface, texting, talking or e-mailing. if any of the following five conditions exist, if you are driving a company car, driving your own car that on company business, if you are on company property, using a company cell phone or if you are using your own cell phone but on company business. any one of those you cannot do it and these guys have a very zero-tolerance policy. they look at this the same way they do have impaired driving and drunk driving. let's talk a little bit about productivity. if you think about it, if you go

back in history a little bit these devices were created for the business community. if you remember i had the first ones called the carphone. the only place you could get them, big boxes were mounted in the front and the first one i had my company paid over $3000 for it. very few people using them for short periods of time because the networks were not built and this goes to some of the things you heard earlier about risk or blanton or exposure to risk. that is what is change so much over the years because everyone has one but what we are finding out and the evidence is still a little bit anecdotal at this point but what we are finding out is we don't think it's having a negative impact on productivity to put these policies in place. we have surveyed 10,000 of our members and we have 2000 responses. a fourth of those had total ban policies in place and of that only seven, of that only seven companies said said they have had a decrease in productivity. look at the next step. 46 companies reported a

productivity increase after putting policies in place. we have suspicions on why that is and we are trying to confirm that now. we surveyed fortune 500 companies a year ago. we did not get a large enough response to be representative. we had 180 of the companies who responded. of that, 20% had total ban policies in place. 19% of those had increased and only 7% were decrease. we are excited about this because again the only pushback you get from companies is what impact this is going to have an productivity. we are doing case studies of some accompanies the track hard measures of productivity and we will have answers on that very soon. i want to mention the vast majority of these companies that at the policies in place, the vast majority, want to protect the health and safety of their employees, not because they are worried about risk and liability but it is a real concern. it's becoming more and more so.

you see some settlements and jury awards and we read more about it everyday so there's some very real liability for employers that don't have policies in place. okay, let me just summarize a little bit. employers are leading by example. we are excited about this. quite frankly i've had the opportunity to work with legislators around the country. it's a lot easier working with employers. they seem to understand much more quickly and take action much more quickly. risk management is a concern that they are more interested in the safety and health of their employees. it appears this productivity is not negatively affected. early reports for employers are telling us the crashes are going down and we are really excited about that and that is what we would expect. what i am very excited about is, it appears the workplace policies are having a multiplier effect. people are taking it home and saying hey do you know what? i'm getting along just fine driving without a cell phone and understand how great the risk

is. lastly i would like to just say we do need local, state and federal government to lead by example and again i'd thank the ntsb for what you've done. i think it's probably the time the rest of federal government looks at this and puts policy in place. >> thank you very much mr. teater. this afternoon's panel representative will be jeffrey michael of the highway safety ministries in. dr. michael is the associate administrator for research and program development at nhtsa where he oversees the agency's research office of criminal justice office and impaired driving in occupant protection office and emergency medical services office. dr. michael. >> thankthank you dr. present tk you chairman hersman and the board for allowing me to talk about nhtsa's work with driver distraction and behavioral strategies. our focus at nhtsa has been on the use of high disability law enforcement for reducing driver distraction and behaviors and i want to talk to you a little bit about our rationale for

selecting that approach and what it involves. our hypothesis, the hypothesis that led us to conducting the demonstration program that dr. chaudhary spoke about this morning is the cell phone cell phone use, cell phone distraction, is essentially similar to other driver behavioral problems that we have had some success in dealing with, notably seatbelt use and drinking and driving. as it is similar we believe and that the behavior is under the driver control. it is similar in that there's a clear safety connection to the behavior and it's similar in that there is widespread public support for policy in the area. let me talk a little bit about the seatbelt analogy here. back in the early 80s, despite aggressive use of flying pumpkin

advertisements we were unable to get seatbelt use up above 20%. the first state to pass a mandatory seatbelt law was new york state in 1984. once evaluated, the other states were quickly convinced and came on board very rapidly and by the mid-90s, every state but new hampshire had a law. the laws themselves prove to increase seatbelt use up into the 60% range, without a particularly aggressive enforcement. in the late '90s, following again a successful demonstration led by the insurance institute for highway safety in north carolina, of high-visibility seatbelt law enforcement, we spread that approach across the nation, which drove use from the

mid-sixties up to the mid-80% range. a little bit more about this technique of high-visibility enforcement. there have been a number of studies, as we refer to this morning by the first panel, but one particularly clear one was done in 2002 just as the click or ticket program as we have known it was spread across the country and an evaluation of states that conducted the full program, which involves aggressive law enforcement usually checkpoint because of their public visibility, plus paid and aren't media that advertise the existence of this enforcement. states they use the full package experienced an and 8.6% increase in value values and states that

conducted part of the package, just the enforcement, much less, 2.7. other states that conducted other approaches, mostly awareness and education, about a half a percent increase in seatbelt use. another analogy can be seen with drinking and driving. here is also a good example of the effect of victim advocacy. about 200 state laws were passed between the early 80s in the mid-90s, largely as a result of mothers against drunk driving working in the country. these laws and some level of continual enforcement resulted in a rather sharp drop in the proportion of fatalities that were related to impaired driving. once the laws were in place by

the mid-to late '90s, the rate of decrease in that proportion slowed and became fairly stable after that. there was continual enforcement for drunk driving, but we found the same pattern with regard to high-visibility law enforcement. again a number of studies were conducted with regard to the effectiveness of high-visibility enforcement of drunk driving laws and perhaps they are best characterized by the centers for disease control systematic review of studies of sobriety checkpoints which found that to be 20% or more effective in reducing alcohol-related fatalities. so in conclusion, we believe that, as part of the conference of program that needs to involve everything from education and employer programs to technology development, that is part of the

conference of program that strong laws and strong law enforcement will play an important role in reducing distracted driving crashes. we plan to pursue this path further in the next step will be to conduct statewide demonstrations, to demonstrate how such a strategy can work on a larger scale. thank you. >> thank you dr. michael. chairman hersman that concludes the opening remarks and i will turn the panel over to you for questions. >> thank you so much dr. bruce and thank you to all of you. you've given us a lot to talk about and mr. teater it's been a pleasure to work with you on a number of fronts over the years and i want to also recognize that you also have a personal commitment to this issue as well. i didn't know if you wanted to share anything about that. >> thanks for the opportunity. unfortunately i got involved in this because my son was killed by a distracted driver in 2004.

i worked in a business committees my entire career and i'm still working with them but on a different front at this point. it is rewarding to be a will to be here and comment on these issues. >> absolutely and your presentation about the business community is super strong and we are so excited about that and we look forward to having a continuing dialogue. >> mr. teater i'm sorry for your loss as well as the loss of others who are here and i think we have all been through some tragedy. that is what gets us into this business. for me it was a very best friend who died in a plane crash and having family members and aviation -- as well and to see friends die, does have a profound effect on what we do. so thank you for your commitment. this whole morning and now afternoon has been fascinating and there are three things that

i want to get out of today. three things and points that i felt like i really wanted to squeeze out. one with the issue about the myths we talked about before, before lunch, hands-free. to think we might've made that point. the other is, another is the particularity information. i think it was on december the 13th that we issued recommendations for a ban on -- while driving. i went out with some friends and i think it was truman that said if you want a friend in washington, get a dog and my friends were not friends after we issued those recommendations. the attack me on a productivity issue, so you said that there were some additional information you could share about the productivity. you know, that's it. this guy was a business person so what are we doing about productivity? you have information to show that it has gone up in many cases so can you talk about

that? >> ackerley this gone up in acute -- a few cases but it's gone up in more cases than companies reporting the opposite. the vast majority of companies say they don't notice any difference in these are what i would call opinion data. we don't have hard measures of productivity and that is what we are seeking to gain out companies who are currently putting in bands. what companies will tell you is that the people are trying to multitask, which we know is a myth, when they're trying to do juggle to task like driving through chicago and closing a business deal on the telephone, when they get out of the car, they are stressed, they are less productive and some other things we hear anecdotally is that the vast majority of the calls by the driver are not critical business calls. they may seem like it to them but they are really just passing time and in many cases they are passing time with somebody back in the office. they may be talking about something business related and they likely are but there is no agenda and no expected outcome so it's a time situation.

we speculate that is why we see productivity going up but we have done now three studies one by a private company had to buy us and we have a conferences of data. they are all saying there's either no change or slight increase in productivity. very little response whatsoever that there has been a decrease. >> i sort of suspected as much. if i want to really talk about something that i really need to understand and understand the intricacies of it like talked to staff, our staff about an accident report something like that, it got to devote all of my cognitive energies to that discretion and not tried this multitasking which you have described as a myth. i would think you are right in that sense, productivity can go down if you're trying to close a business deal but you can devote 100% of your attention to it if you're not as productive. i suspect it may be some of that. thank you for those data. it's fascinating and now i can go back and use those data to rekindle the friendship i guess.

the other issue that i really wanted to talk about is the liability issue that companies have and i suspect, because i read an article back in about 2005 when i was still in, prior to it -- private industry and the notion if your company doesn't have a cell phone policy or wireless communication, and your employees conducting business and something happens, how much exposure does your company potentially have? that is what i'm curious about and you have listed some there so as high as $21 million or so? >> the exposure is substantial and if you talk to some plaintiff lawyers, one gentleman who representative the family against a business and they had a large settlement. he was so moved by the research studies that i hope i never have another one of these cases and i want to carry this message to employers about why they need policies and why they need to enforce those policies. the general public attitudes and

opinions are changing about cell phone drivers and they're not very favorable. in fact i think there is a recent study in california that said california drivers are more fearful of cell phone drivers than drunk drivers and it's the first time anything asserts past the drunk driving -- these people are on juries and they see companies that are profiting by allowing are sometimes mandating employees to work while they're driving and they're afraid of this activity, like sending a large settlement or a large award as a way to discourage behavior and thus protect their family. >> that's a real -- if you are promoting your employees to use wireless communication devices you are really boosting your organization up to more exposure. thank you. >> this morning we had panelists who described the younger drivers as having the most difficulty managing distractiond

from doctors mcgehee that young drivers, the largest cause of death is motor vehicle crashes. but you also used a word which i thought was fascinating. you said they are addicted to cell phones. can you describe what you mean by addicted? i think you said cell phones and social media. >> i use that term loosely in the sense that it is a gap in the general research and when you take a look at the share of volume of interaction with the phone, where we see adolescents texting 4000 times a month and we look at the number of facebook interactions and other social media and the number of notifications that are coming through, one of the gaps as we know people respond very

very quickly or feel compelled to answer very quickly. in the context of driving, they are still willing to pick peek at that phone or answer back because the delay in response sometimes can have social meaning as well. is that ers and ignoring me? that maybe only 15 seconds. these are the kinds of things we need to learn much more about. >> so effectively if the conversation, not just texting. >> exactly. sierra there in your opinion any particularly effective countermeasures for this? >> well i think you know, it's been mentioned several times that kids lead by example and changing the social norms is really the first place to start. certainly, there are a number of technologies that can lock out your phone while driving so parents can have that conversation. communications is key and one of the elements of the coaching

technologies is bringing the conversation of the parent and the team together about driving. this is a very highly risky activity so to compare that with some of these intervention technologies that might lock out your phone while it was moving furthers that conversation. >> a lockout is kind of a mechanical way to do it. are there other behavioral changes other than forcing somebody to not use it? i mean because the tendency is when you for somebody to do something, the game that that is started and you will figure a way to get around that, especially if it's your parents. >> i think there is certainly an element of that and that is why a comprehensive, comprehensive change of behavior is called for here in terms of learning what the limits are of drivers. graduated driver's licensing has shown to be effective in terms of one element, a texting them

or electronic media ban for the first six months and states vary on that. so collectively come all, all those kinds of things can work and that is where we need to really take a look at outcomes and crash data are notoriously difficult to understand how each individual behavioral change technique might be affected. >> to you see the younger population is being receptive to this message? >> i think it's something that is certainly very much on the minds of people now. we see people texting and we see people talking on the phone while the drive and what we see in our own naturalistic driving date is that people.those things out. we see them saying hey a person is on the phone so it's much more salient to us now as dave teater mansion in california. people are more fearful of distracted drivers and that is

really a message that is coming through now. >> it earlier today somebody mention an mentioned an anecdote about their children reminding them to put their seatbelts on. how far are we away from having the children invite the parents not to use a cell phone or to text? >> that is a great question and something that i thought about a lot in the progression of our own family and how the safety belt has been an important part of that. i've been reminded even though i am a very dedicated safety belt where, that kids will remind adults. i think if you start off in your family being that way and that is the message that is consistent, then i think that teens or rather the kids will talk to their parents about that. >> alright, thank you. >> we should actually differentiate that we are talking about two different

areas that we need to change. one is the individual changer -- behavior change, attitudes specifically and that one literally, literally you have control of whether you were turned a message the text. besides the individual everyone is referring to the societal or cultural change and really the attitude and behavior change at both those levels. can you tell us, let's get explicit here. what are the attitudes we are really trying to change the teenagers and everyone has about being able to drive with phones and how is that disconnected from behavior with the research. >> i will take a stab at that. i think a lot of that is unknown. the specifics are protective factors and risk factors relative to this issue and it will vary depending on your audience. our foundation ford traffic safety a few years back did some

research looking at messaging that was encouraging behavior change among a specific group of people. in this case it was drivers, ages 17 through 26, and we peeled back sort of their value system relative to this issue to try to get at what is the fundamental, sort of issue, with distracted driving, texting in particular that will really sort of drive you to make the change in your behavior? as we peel back those layers would ultimately we found was that it was guilt. fear of themselves being hurt. there is that invincibility factor among young people that we are all well aware of relative to a variety of areas but it was the fear of guilt, having hurt herger killed somebody else when you knew better. these people's view that testing was dangerous. they knew that they shouldn't do it. they knew that there were risks involved. they need the data, but they did it anyway and when we got to the

messages that would lead to a change in behavior, it was wow i would feel stupid. in their own words, i will -- would feel stupid to have hurt or killed somebody when i knew better. it wasn't worth it so that may differ for different age groups but in that particular segment of the population, that is what really resonates with them at least in our research. >> i think the general challenge in driving in general is that individuals overestimate their abilities and think everybody else is the bad driver, which clearly the crash data show otherwise. >> a further comment, i think it's difficult to diagnose individual behavior among group behavior but one theory is that drivers behave to a large extent the way they perceive that those

around them expect them to behave and that is the way, a way that community expectations can affect individual driver behavior. that is the way that we believe that strong laws and strong law enforcement can affect the individual. that is a statement by the community of intolerance for a specific behavior. individuals tend to respond to that statement of intolerance. >> i will just add that i really believe it's important that we as a society say what is acceptable and what isn't. there has to be a start at the top before we can expect people to take the appropriate personal responsibility that comes from legislation. comes from corporate policies and rules by parents but it can be difficult to implement policies and enforce policies. i can be difficult for a parent to say this is where you can or can't do when the state says is perfectly fine to do it.

how would we have ever gotten to where we have gotten on with drunk driving if it was never illegal for example. i think we are just at the beginning of culture change and it's got to start with society saying this is okay or it isn't. we have got a ways to go on that. >> if we talk to the earlier panel about legislation and we were talking about politics and the approach to yes or no. i'm just about out of time but we went from the individual which is great because it's not just about -- at all kinds of other levels to the cytoculture part. i'm going to be quiet after this. what about role models? again we can talk about the companies integrate data but what about the role models? high-visibility individuals, what role do those opportunities have been changing behavior at the individual or societal level? >> i will take the first shot at this one. i think the role models matter.

i think role models will be different for different people. i think really what we are talking about here is peer pressure. and i would suggest that actually the chairman kind of spoke to this before the break about taking the initiative in your own lives. we all have social networks and i'm not referring to facebook or twitter. we all have relationships in our communities and with our friends and family and whatnot and started standing up to be an investor in your own social network is the first step. we need to reach the point where we are doing that type of thing. if you hear a psa on tv about distraction and then you hear it from somebody that you love and respect, it's going to hold more weight with you, so i think it starts with individuals. i think that social norms of the highest level is where policy is realmp