senous flaws in a bill to ban teens from

senous flaws in a bill to ban teens from talking and driving.

Members of a House subcommittee voted down Senate Bill 137 by Sen. Jay O’Brien, R-Fairfax, to ban holders of provisional driver’s licenses from talking while driving.

The subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee killed the bill on a 3-2 vote. It was so close that the subcommittee’s chairman, Delegate John Welsh III, R-Virginia Beach, took a recount.

Delegate Danny Bowling, R-Tazewell, said he was worried the bill would strip the ability of parents to contact their children. He said parents want “to be able to call their children while they’re on the road somewhere.”

While O’Brien’s bill stipulated that teens could pull off the road to talk, Bowling said that could take miles on rural roads and place teens out of cell phone service.

Nancy Rodrigues, representing the Virginia Association of Driver’s Education and Traffic Safety, was surprised by the objection.

“I can’t believe that any parent feels the need to get in touch with their child so instantaneously that they’re willing to jeopardize that child’s safety on the roadway. Would you want your child on a cell phone going down a winding road?” she said following the hearing.

Rodrigues said the delegates ignored the teen driving habits. They are more likely to use talk and text-message on phones than other drivers, she told the subcommittee.

Martha Rowe Mitchell of the AAA Mid-Atlantic was also disappointed by the bill’s demise. Teen drivers place others at risk, she said.

“Driving is a full-time job, and it requires full-time attention,” she said. “As a parent of a teen, I’d rather wait five minutes for my son to pull over to a safe location than to be on the phone with him when he T-bones another car.”

Wright testified before the committee, saying people wouldn’t be so impatient about phone calls if they had lost a child.

“I feel like there were a few individuals on the committee that were really thinking about their own opinion rather than doing what’s best,” Wright said after the vote.

O’Brien refused to accept an amendment allowing handsfree phones, citing an Australian study that concluded the risk of accident was equal for hands-free and hand-held phones.

The bill was about divided attention and teens focusing on the conversation, not the road, O’Brien said.

“Driving for teens should be a 100 percent experience, not a 70-30 experience,” O’Brien said following the defeat. “And which is getting the 70 — the driving or the cell phone use?”

Young drivers need to gain miles of experience without incident, O’Brien told the panel. He said teen fatalities had dropped from 149 in the year 2000 to 107 in 2003 because of Virginia’s graduated system of provisional driver’s licenses; the system allows more privileges as teens gain experience. The state mandates 45 hours of instructional time and another 40 hours with parents.

Capt. Steve Chumley, legislative liaison for the Virginia State Police, said his agency supported the bill.

“We were in support of it. We thought that it would reduce fatalities of provisional drivers,” he said.

Welsh said the bill was behind the times because of the ever-expanding functions of cell phones. Listening to music downloaded to a cell phone sitting on the seat next to you would be illegal under the bill, he said.

The state would step into the parents’ arena if the bill passed, he said.

“Parents have the right to take a cell phone away from a child. Parents have the right to say ‘no’ to texting while you’re driving,” Welsh said.

The bill passed the Senate in January on a 30-7 vote.

Many expect to see the bill in 2007. O’Brien has vowed to introduce the bill again. Bowling said he is hopeful the measure will be reworked. Delegate Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, said he expects to see the bill in the future.