Jonathan Zimmerman: Distracted is the New Drunk

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.

I never drink and drive. Now and again, though, I talk on my cellphone while speeding down a highway.

What's the difference? In terms of safety, not much. Studies show that drivers using cellphones are as likely to crash as those who are intoxicated. So when I talk and drive, I'm as dangerous as if I'd been drinking.

But the law lets me to do it. True, Pennsylvania recently became the 35th state to prohibit texting while driving. Yet the new measure effectively invalidated a Philadelphia ban on driving while using a handheld cellphone, which is illegal in New Jersey, New York, and seven other states.

And recent research suggests that using hands-free devices while driving might actually be more dangerous than using handheld ones, because they make drivers feel safe even though they're just as distracted....

As historian Barron H. Lerner shows in his 2011 book One for the Road, laws against drunken driving date back to the early 20th century. But most of these early measures defined "drunk" as having a blood-alcohol level of at least 0.15 percent, the equivalent of about six or more drinks on an empty stomach. And even when drunken drivers caused high-profile accidents, like the one that killed Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in 1949, Americans often expressed as much sympathy for the culprit as they did for the victim. Indeed, the term accident implied that the driver wasn't completely at fault....