Obama: Feds Can't Text and Drive

Nothing makes you a supporter of a ban on "texting while driving" like your body coming into contact with a vehicle driven by some moron fiddling with a cell phone. (Several Ars staffers have had that unpleasant experience firsthand.) President Obama doesn't want any of those morons to be federal employees—as of Thursday, all government employees are banned from texting while driving whenever they are on the job, driving a federal vehicle, or using a government-supplied cell phone.

The executive order affects nearly 4.5 million employees across the US, including postal workers and military personnel. The only situations in which federal workers might be able to get away with texting while driving is if they are not working, they are driving their own vehicle, and they are using their own phone; and that's assuming their particular state doesn't already ban texting and driving.

"This order sends a very clear signal to the American public that distracted driving is dangerous and unacceptable," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood at this week's Distracted Driving Summit in Washington D.C.

Indeed, the Distracted Driving Summit marked one of the first major efforts for federal lawmakers, law enforcement, and safety groups to address not only texting while driving, but all manner of behind-the-wheel distractions. One of the big players at the two-day meeting was the The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which only recently got behind texting while driving bans—previously, the GHSA opposed enacting anti-texting-and-driving laws on the grounds that enforcement would be difficult. The GHSA still believes this but says that recent evidence has pushed it to reconsider supporting the ban and that it would work towards enforcement education in the coming months.

A recent study out of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that those who texted while driving increased their crash risk by 23 times; the state of Utah recently made headlines by passing a law threatening 15 years in prison for those who end up in an accident thanks to texting and driving.

According to the GHSA's helpful table on cell phone driving bans, 18 states plus the District of Columbia already ban text messaging for all drivers, while nine states ban it for "novice" drivers and one state restricts it from school bus drivers only.

According to the US Department of Transportation, there were at least 515,000 injuries and 5,870 fatalities in the US in 2008 as a result of distracted driving—these numbers are taken from police reports, so the actual numbers could be quite a bit higher.