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Boston to bar texting while driving in city-owned vehicles

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 25, 2009 04:38 PM

By Matt Collette, Globe Correspondent

Starting Monday, city employees will be banned from sending text messages while driving in city-owned vehicles, Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced this afternoon outside the Government Center T station, which in May was the site of a train collision apparently caused by a driver occupied by his cell phone.

"We don't want to say you should not do it when we're not doing it ourselves," Menino said.

Menino said he has asked the city's Office of Labor Relations to work with unions to draft the specifics of the policy, including punishments for offenders.

The policy follows the MBTA's decree that bans train operators and bus drivers from even carrying cell phones while working. Both Menino and Daniel Grabauskas, manager of the MBTA, said they hope their policies will persuade drivers to change their habits.

"I get complaints from my bus drivers about how they have been cut off by drivers distracted by their own texting," Grabauskas said at the news conference. "A couple of seconds of convenience is not worth what you might look up at the last second and see."

At the end of the event, Menino and Melissa Martin, whose daughter Amanda died in a car crash in 2007 that occured shortly after she sent a text message, unveiled a public-service announcement sign.

The sign read "Texting while driving? It may be the last thing you ever do" and showed a driver sending a text message that read "BI-BI 143," which organizers said was text-message lingo for "Bye-bye, I love you."

"I understand the resistance to change, especially when it comes to driving," Martin said. "But I do believe we will get to be where we need to be: on safe roads."