www.roanoke.com

A woman was stopping traffic the other day on Main Street in Blacksburg. Though the light had changed to green, she lingered in the crosswalk between Moe's and Sharkey's, text messaging.

Nobody honked at her -- we all know how people using cellphones can be oblivious. But are we wise to be so blase?

A former Virginia Tech student was sentenced in August to a year in jail for hitting pedestrians with her sport utility vehicle. She had been text messaging and driving under the influence of alcohol when she veered onto a sidewalk. According to a story published in The Roanoke Times, a police officer who testified at her trial said she told him she didn't know anything had happened until her vehicle's air bags deployed.

In September, a commuter train collided with a freight outside Los Angeles, killing 25 people. Seconds before the crash, the commuter train's engineer was text messaging. The National Transportation Safety Board reported later that the engineer, who died in the crash, had been texting throughout his shift. His autopsy found no evidence of illegal drugs, alcohol or medication that might have been a factor, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Another commuter train crash that injured several people in San Francisco this year may have been related to cellphone use, investigators said. Those two incidents prompted the California Public Utilities Commission to issue emergency bans on use of personal electronic devices by railroad employees on duty.

In Virginia, however, using an electronic device while driving is not a violation.

"It's come up a couple of times in the past three years, but Virginia hasn't passed any legislation regarding cellphone usage," said Sgt. Nathan O'Dell of the Blacksburg Police Department's crime prevention unit.

If a talking or texting driver is weaving, going too slowly or tailgating, then officers would investigate, O'Dell said.

"A person can be cited because attention is taken away from the road." Officers' response "depends on traffic and the affect on other drivers."

He recalled an incident when a woman was pulled over for driving erratically while putting on makeup.

O'Dell said he has seen a shift recently in public opinion.

"People are calling and complaining because of the driving behavior. We can't cite them for the phone use per se but for the violation."

The state is taking notice, too. "For some time now, when we file our motor vehicle crash reports, we have to list what the driver was doing at the time," O'Dell said. "The state is getting statistics on that."

The General Assembly's Joint Commission on Technology and Science is backing a bill that would outlaw text messaging while operating a motor vehicle or bicycle on a highway.

At a legislative subcommittee hearing Sept. 9 in Richmond, Thomas Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, testified that looking away from the road just before an unexpected event or condition accounts for 70 percent to 90 percent of wrecks or near misses.

In his presentation, posted on the JCOTS Web site, he cited cellphone dialing and text messaging as particularly high-risk activities. And he noted that teens are four times more likely than adults to be involved in a near-crash or crash while performing a secondary task.

"We have a teen-distracted-driving epidemic," Dingus stated in his presentation.

The latest electronic devices are extremely dangerous to use behind the wheel, and a new generation of users has "a high degree of confidence, an insatiable motivation to use the technology, an underdeveloped sense of risk perception and a propensity to exercise poor judgment."

In fairness, it isn't just teens who make judgment errors, nor are newfangled electronics solely to blame. In 2001, one of Nepal's best-known Sherpa guides vanished. His body and his camera were found the next morning at the bottom of a crevasse, The Associated Press reported. He had apparently been taking pictures around the base camp when he stepped backward off a cliff, according to the Everest News' Web site.

A man who had reached the Everest summit 10 times, a task requiring almost superhuman skills and conditioning, was lost not to a blizzard but a moment of inattention.

On streets and highways, inattention by cellphone talkers and texters, whether walking or driving, is dangerous. Older drivers are often the target of jokes for their cautious road habits. It turns out that they have wisdom and experience on their side.

Maybe the jokes should be about folks who can't walk and text message at the same time.

Actually, that's not funny.

Giles County native Deanne Estrada is the communications coordinator for a global agricultural program managed at Virginia Tech.