Hands-Free Driving Bill Finally Upon Massachusetts Motorists

Nine years after the state implemented a difficult-to-enforce ban on texting while driving, five months after legislative negotiators began the latest attempt to take phones out of drivers' hands, and three and a half months after their original agreement collapsed, lawmakers Monday queued up a compromise bill that could reach the governor's desk as soon as this week.

The legislation, filed with support from all six members of a conference committee tasked with resolving differences between the original House and Senate versions, would forbid the use of all handheld electronic devices behind the wheel, except for those in hands-free mode. Drivers could view electronic maps on a device mounted to the windshield, dashboard or center console, but they could not use their hands to interact with any electronic beyond a single touch or tap to active hands-free mode.

Motorists who violate the new regulation would face fines between $100 and $500, and third and subsequent offenses would be surchargeable for insurance purposes.

The committee's negotiated bill also updates existing data collection requirements, calling for state agencies to track the age, gender and race of every motorist issued a citation or warning and to publish an anonymized summary of the data every year as a way to monitor for profiling by law enforcement.

"It's really a bill that's going to improve public safety on our roads and hopefully end the act of distracted driving," Sen. Joseph Boncore, the conference committee's Senate co-chair, told the News Service after the report was filed. "It really improves transparency in our public safety processes and the analysis we can now do on individual law enforcement agencies."

The House plans to vote Tuesday on whether to accept the conference committee's report, and the Senate is tentatively planning to take a similar vote Wednesday. If it passes in both branches as expected, the bill will reach Gov. Charlie Baker this week, who included similar handheld ban language in his own driving safety bill this year.

Once signed, the law would take effect 90 days later, though motorists would only receive warnings for violating any of the new provisions until March 31, 2020.

"We are so relieved to finally be at this point — to see the final language for a hands-free bill. We have waited many years for this," said Emily Stein, president of the Safe Roads Alliance, in a statement. "This law will save lives, and it will help to educate drivers about the serious consequences of phone use while driving. We have lost too many lives, too many disabling, serious injuries that were caused by a distracted driver. This is a big step towards preventing more of these senseless, preventable crashes."

House Speaker Robert DeLeo said in a statement that the conference agreement "will make the roads of Massachusetts safer by strengthening our distracted driving laws and keeping phones and devices out of the hands of those operating vehicles."

Lawmakers for years have been unable to agree on legislation to crack down on distracted driving, even as the rapid spread of smartphones exacerbated the problem. The House approved legislation several times in the late 2000s — before the existing law went into place — requiring hands-free phone use, but the Senate was not on board.

Rep. Joseph Wager, one of the conference committee members, warned in 2009 that banning only electronic messages while driving would be unenforceable, but one year later, the current ban on texting and emailing behind the wheel went into effect.

More recently, roles were reversed and the Senate approved its own version of a handheld device ban each of the two previous two-year sessions, but over that span, the House never took a final vote on a bill.

At least 20 other states already have hands-free device use requirements on the books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"While I am thankful that we have reached a final agreement, it is very hard to celebrate knowing this should have been dealt with years ago," said Sen. Mark Montigny, who has been pushing for a similar bill for more than a decade and has ramped up criticism of his colleagues this fall as negotiations stretched on. "Distracted driving has claimed the lives of far too many innocent people and wreaked havoc upon families, forever robbed of planning graduations, weddings, and holidays."

Finding consensus between the branches, particularly as it related to data collection, ensnared the conference committee for months and split onlookers. Some called for separating the debate and passing a simple handheld phone ban as soon as possible.

Under the original Senate bill (S 2250), police would need to record demographic information for every single motorist stopped, regardless of the stop's outcome. The proposal also called for the data to be made publicly available with personally identifying information removed.

The House bill (H 3793) called for recording that data at stops that ended in citations, and it required the state to work with an outside entity to produce an annual analysis. While the report could be published, it did not call for the underlying data to be available to the public.

The final compromise bill settled somewhere between those two. An outside entity would still be involved in the analysis and the raw data sent to that organization would be private, but the new version (H 4203) also calls for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security to publish an annual report "containing aggregate numbers, listed by municipality and law enforcement agency" for each demographic category collected in broad age ranges and times of day.

Any police department found by the administration to have engaged in racial or gender profiling would be required to implement bias training and to track demographic data at all traffic stops, not just those ending in citations, for one year. The bill also includes language requiring the administration to study the feasibility of collecting data from every traffic stop, not only those ending in citations, and submit a report by April 1.

Civil rights groups had urged negotiators to follow the Senate's approach, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts criticized the ultimate resolution Monday as "one step forward, two steps back."

"It's a step forward for the legislature to acknowledge racial disparities in traffic stops as a problem, but a missed opportunity to effectively address it," said ACLUM Racial Justice Program Director Rahsaan Hall in a statement. "Despite the Senate's best efforts to increase data collection and transparency, this bill simply repackages existing law on data collection and imposes new limits on data access."

Rep. William Straus, the House's conference committee co-chair, said he believes the criticism is misplaced.

"I don't think the comment benefits from a full appreciation for what's actually in the conference report based on both an independent analysis by a university every year and a separate information report that will be freely made, no one has to ask for it, public by the secretary," Straus told the News Service. "I think we can accomplish both addressing racial profiling and privacy protections, which also is why the bill came to the floor the issue."

"Our belief is that any group can access this data and should be able to have a conversation or do their own analysis on it," Boncore said. "This is an improvement on the 2000 [data collection] law, and we really can't allow perfect to be the enemy of the good."

All six members of the conference committee — Boncore, Sen. William Browsberger, Sen. Dean Tran, Wagner, Straus and Rep. Timothy Whelan — signed the conference committee jacket indicating their support for the compromise.

They had almost settled the matter months ago when they reached an "agreement in principle" on July 31, but that deal collapsed. Representatives left what they thought was a final version in the clerk's office after it was screened by legal counsel, but senators declined to sign.