Traffic officers in Fairfax County have stepped up their enforcement of distracted driving with stricter enforcement techniques along roads in the county with high volumes of crashes and incidents.
The department has been placing officers in unorthodox locations to get a good view of “careless behaviors that take a driver’s focus of the road,” said traffic division Capt. Susan Culin.
The result: a 66 percent increase in citations issued since Sept. 10, compared with the same stretch of time in 2008.
Overall, police have issued 7,165 summonses so far in 2010, far more than the 4,305 issued just two years ago.
The extra enforcement measures have led to the staggering number of tickets, but so has an escalation in careless behavior by drivers, said police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell.
“It’s kind of a combination,” Caldwell said. “But we know it’s out there, and we’re looking for it.”
While most drivers correlate cell phones with distracted driving, Virginia law is much more lax than similar laws in Maryland and the District, which have both banned talking or texting with a hand-held device while driving.
Texting while driving is prohibited for everyone in Virginia, but hand-held devices may still be used for other purposes, like checking GPS. And texting is only a secondary offense, so drivers won’t be pulled over simply for sending or receiving messages. Only teenagers with provisional licenses are prohibited from using a cell phone in any way while driving.
Instead of limiting their focus to cell phones, Fairfax police have been looking for less obvious signs of careless behavior that are also punishable by law.
An officer could pull over a driver for “failure to pay full time and attention” to the road, according to county code. Under Virginia state motor vehicle codes, it’s illegal to wear headphones in both ears while driving, or drive in a reckless manner “so as to endanger the life, limb, or property of any person.”
Caldwell said officers typically will not pull someone over unless they observe reckless behavior like weaving or drifting off the road that they associate with the use of a phone or device.
