As rush hour hit U.S. 80 in Pooler on a recent Thursday afternoon, officer Michael Swords pulled an unmarked police truck onto the median and looked down into the cars slowly headed westbound.
The Pooler police officer kept his eyes peeled for drivers whose eyes were fixated on cellphones instead of the road. Police in the west Chatham County city are cracking down on motorists who violate Georgia’s ban on texting while driving.
“A lot of people don’t understand it’s very dangerous to look down and text,” Swords said.
Since motorists generally know it’s illegal to play on their phones while driving, many who choose to do so will try to be stealthy about it and keep the devices in their laps, Swords said. From his vantage point in the truck, he watched for drivers who stared down at their legs while inching along the highway.
The stop-and-go traffic made it difficult for him to pull out and follow a few people who were clearly looking at phones, but it wasn’t long before he found himself on the road next to a woman who thumbed at a phone while she drove along U.S. 80. Swords pulled the lapel camera off his uniform and pointed it out the window toward the woman as evidence to add to his observations.
While Swords was in the process of writing the woman a ticket, another Pooler police officer rolled up and shared a story about pulling over a man he worried was drunk due to erratic swerving. It turned out, the officer said, the man had been using an iPad while driving.
A ticket for violating Georgia’s texting ban typically comes with a $150 fine. The law bans “writing, sending, or reading text based communication” while driving.
It’s also illegal to do so in stopped traffic. Police say it’s not necessarily safer looking at the phone in slow-moving or even stalled traffic.
“You’re still on a roadway,” Swords said. “You’re not in a safe location to be using that phone.”
In addition to the obvious risk of fender benders, failing to pay attention in slow moving traffic can create other conditions that have a negative impact on other motorists, police say.
“They fail to pay attention to the light changes and cause delayed responses, causing traffic to congest behind them,” said Pooler Police Chief Mark Revenew.
Revenew said police in Pooler have issued eight citations for texting while driving in the past few months. When motorists are fiddling with their phones to change music or access GPS, they can be cited with failure to exercise due care.
In Effingham County, police are also on the lookout for motorists who text behind the wheel.
“There are also so many different distractions in cars these days such as GPS devices, radios and iPods,” said David Ehsanipoor, Effingham County Sheriff’s Office spokesman. “Our Traffic Enforcement Team also goes to different schools in the county to talk to teens about the danger of texting while driving.
“Over the past couple years we have had at least two or three crashes that we believe were the result of distracted driving.
“It’s not worth risking your life or other people’s lives. That text message can always wait.”