By Chelyen Davis

RICHMOND — Eating while driving continues to be legal, after a House subcommittee shot down Del. Bobby Orrock’s distracted driving bill.

The subcommittee of the House Militia, Police and Public Safety committee failed to report his bill; subcommittees don’t officially kill bills, but failing to report it essentially means the bill is done for the year.

Orrock’s legislation would have banned drivers from any activity that impaired their operation of the vehicle. That could range from texting to eating, grooming, or changing radio stations.

Orrock told the subcommittee he was inspired to file the bill when, two weeks before the General Assembly session began, he saw a man driving down State Route 1, in the left lane, going slower than other traffic (a separate peeve, Orrock said) and using his iPad.

“What an idiot,” Orrock said.

But, he said, without police witnessing actual illegal behavior, there’s little they can do about such drivers.

“Did you see any reckless behavior? No, I saw stupid behavior,” he said.
While Orrock proposed amending his bill to require a study of how the state handles driving offenses, the subcommittee was not swayed.

Del. Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge, said he feels that bills such as Orrock’s or the plethora of bills to ban texting while driving distract police from focusing on using the existing reckless driving statutes.

Those laws, Cline said, should cover a wide range of distracted driving activities. Bills this year and in recent years have been drawn to the code section that bans texting while driving (which is a secondary offense, not a primary one).

“We need to refocus the attention of law enforcement and our judges” on the reckless driving section of code, Cline said.

The subcommittee also failed to report several other bills that would have variously made texting while driving a primary offense, banned distracted driving activities more specifically than Orrock’s bill, and barred use of hand-held personal communications devices even while riding a bike.

John Talmadge of Dinwiddie County came to testify on one of those. He cited an accident in Richmond just last week in which a driver who was allegedly texting drove across a median struck another car head-on. The texting driver and her passenger were killed.

“If we don’t do something, you’re going to have a lot of people injured or killed,” Talmadge said.