By Marc Fisher
Sunday, January 28, 2007

I n the two years since it became illegal in the District to talk on a cellphone while driving, the city has slapped 19,000 tickets on motorists for violating the law. Yet no one believes the law has had much impact on the practice of chatting while holding a handset.

So the city has decided to try another way to send the message about distracted driving: Billboards. Billboards you look up at while you are . . . driving.

Forty-three billboards scattered across the city will announce that "Distracted Drivers Kill!" and display complicated logos that appear to show things you ought not handle while driving -- a cellphone, a fast-food meal and something to do with makeup.

"You can't make this stuff up," marvels Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, an advocacy group that campaigns against billboards. "Billboards are by definition themselves distracting. Otherwise they would be worthless as a way of conveying messages. So, apparently, [the D.C. Department of Transportation] wants motorists to turn their head from the road in order to read the message that turning one's head from the road is dangerous."

The city's new transportation director, Emeka Moneme, says billboards "can help us spread the word that if you're driving in the District of Columbia, pay attention to the road, and only to the road."

Fry counters: "I guess he means pay attention only to the road except when you are reading the billboard."

Until a few years ago, billboards were largely banned in the District; the exception was a few dozen sign locations that had been grandfathered in by Congress in 1931. But in 2001, then-Mayor Anthony Williams pushed through regulations allowing 32 huge signs that wrap around buildings. While many other cities were trying to get billboards removed, Washington rolled out the red carpet for outdoor advertising companies.

To smooth the political path for more billboards, the companies that make their living plastering advertising in the public space offered to let the District use 43 signs to send its own messages.

"Last year, we used those signs to get across the idea that drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists should share the road," says DDOT spokesman Erik Linden. "This time, we chose to focus on distracted driving."

Reasonably enough, D.C. police believe that too many people "do too much while they're driving," as police spokesman Kevin Morrison puts it. Officers regularly see drivers tapping away on their BlackBerrys, applying makeup, shaving or reading the newspaper. Last year, police issued 8,100 tickets -- the fine is $100 -- for violations of the law against using electronic devices while driving. (Exceptions are made for motorists making an emergency call or using a hands-free hookup.) Officers also gave 6,800 drivers warnings for the same offense.

Linden says he'd be happy to explain to Scenic America that the billboards "are not meant just for motorists, but for pedestrians, too" and that "we don't believe they are an immense distraction."

Immense or not, isn't there a certain irony in using billboards to send this message? Linden wouldn't go there.

But Fry was happy to cite a National Traffic Safety Administration study that says anything that diverts a driver's eyes from the road for more than two seconds increases the chances of mishaps. "Surely, any billboard communicating the anti-distraction message with its bold graphics and copy would require the driver to take at least two seconds to absorb," Fry says.

It took me about two minutes to figure out that one image on the D.C. billboard is supposed to be a tube of lipstick.

So what's a city to do? If people are willing to risk a $100 ticket to keep yakking, no billboard will change their minds. I'd ban phone use by drivers, period -- the research shows no real safety advantage in using the hands-free devices. But a ban is obviously not going to happen. Tripling the fine might help; at a certain point, money does talk.

Then the city could use the proceeds to replace the money it gets from billboard companies -- and order them to take down their signs. Or is daydreaming considered distracting driving, too?

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com