HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — More than half of the country has some sort of state law in place prohibiting the use of cell phones while driving. On June 16, Alabama joined that list when Gov. Kay Ivey signed the distracted driving bill into law. It is now a secondary offense to hold a mobile device for any reason while driving.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than 300 million people in the United States have cell phones, which means that at any given moment during the daylight hours, more than 800,000 vehicles are driven by someone with a hand-held phone.
"Driving distracted is just as dangerous as driving impaired or intoxicated," said Clay Ingram with AAA. "Drinking and driving has become socially unacceptable in recent years, yet texting and driving has not reached that point, and that's where we're hoping to go with this."
Statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show than more than 3,000 people were killed in crashes involving distracted drivers in 2020 -- but that figure could be higher.
"A lot of times it's underreported because people don't want to admit at the scene of a crash that they were on their phone," Ingram said.
Now that Alabama is enforcing a hands-free law, there will be consequences if you are discovered with a phone in your hand while driving.
"You can be written a ticket and you have to pay a fine," said Ingram. "If you get a second fine, it's it's significantly more than the first one. If you get a third one, it goes up again and so on.
"It's not a moneymaking thing for the state," he added. "The fines aren't high enough for that, but it's it's just to sort of help motivate people to refrain from doing it."
Several previous attempts to put a distracted driving law on the books in Alabama failed to garner enough support.