AUGUSTA, Maine — Lawmakers moved quickly Tuesday on a late bill aimed at creating more deterrents for young drivers who break the law.
Members of the Transportation Committee approved most of the items contained in LD 1912, which was sponsored by Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, and was the result of weeks of study by Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers.
The bill now goes to the House and Senate for consideration this week.
As drafted, LD 1912 seeks to increase the minimum fine for texting while driving, and also would increase fines and terms of license suspension for violating conditions of a provisional license. One of the proposed changes would have increased the minimum fine for texting while driving from $100 to $350, but the committee settled on a minimum fine of $250 in the version of the bill sent to the full Legislature.
Diamond, a former Secretary of State, said improving driving laws and requirements for young people has long been a priority for that office.
“Two things young people don’t want to lose is their cellphone and their driver’s license,” he said. “Increasing these fines should help send a message.”
Summers said he was compelled to study teen driving trends once he took office and spent weeks with a technical review panel that met it communities across the state.
“There was near unanimity from the public for more severe penalties for young, inexperienced drivers who break the law, for mandating more time-behind-the-wheel experience before getting a driver’s license and modernizing driver’s education in order to address today’s challenges that drivers face,” Summers wrote in his report.
The proposed changes in LD 1912 are just part of what Summers wants to do to improve teen driving.
In a report last month to the Transportation Committee, Summers recommended doubling, from 35 to 70, the number of supervised hours a driver with a permit must log before obtaining a driver’s license.
He also said that anyone under the age of 21 should hold a permit for one year instead of six months so they can experience “supervised driving time in all four of Maine’s seasons,” and called for increasing the age of an accompanying driver from 20 to 25.
Another suggestion is to move some of the driver’s education classroom time to online learning, which Summers said would allow instructors to devote more quality time to direct instruction behind the wheel.
Because Summers’ report was only completed last month, it wasn’t clear if legislation would be drafted in time for consideration this session.
Diamond said the bill that was drafted included only a small portion of what was outlined in the report, but he said additional changes could be brought back for the next legislative session.
Follow BDN reporter Eric Russell on Twitter @BDNPolitics.
How about a stronger deterrent to teen texting while driving of a two year loss of licensing privileges. That might have more bite than a $250 fine in trying to end this epidemic of callousness.
Why would you make a stricter law when most teenagers don’t obey the existing law? We have the death penalty in about 38 states and a life sentence in the rest of the states – and it does not stop anyone from committing the approximately 20,000 murders we have in our country each year. I was taking a criminal justice course when they passed the strict OUI law with a mandatory jail sentence that was going to do away with drunk driving on our highways according to my instructor, District Attorney David Crook. As we know, it stopped nothing. The big myth is that severe penalties deter crime. If that were true folks, all we have to do to eliminate all crime is to have the death penalty for all crimes, right? Folks, penalogists, socialogists and other professional people have been studying crime and punishment for 200 years and they have yet to come up with a deterrent. People do what they do and that is the way it is.
Don’t forget the death penalty for all crimes would also help solve the problem of overcrowding in our jails !
Even for a short trout or over your limit, right? Jails are not overcrowded. We just built them too small and too few of them. LOL. OK, back to mowing my lawn and watching the robins execute the worms.
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Yeah but this one makes sense ! It’s good so I don’t think it will pass.
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Off the subject a bit, but it was very interesting for me to visit the Legislative Law Library and see that only three laws existed in 1820 when Maine become a State with one of them being a bounty on wolves. And then to see the law books on the shelves become thicker and thicker and greater in number over the years to the point of now needing a tractor trailer truck to haul all of the books containing the laws, ordinances, rules and regulations if you wanted to move them to another location. Where does it end, you ask? Only in an armed revolution like what is, and has been happening all over the world in the past. Sounds a bit pessemistic, I know. But like author and philosopher George Orwell, said, “It’s the way of the world.” It’s also the way of the Maine Legislature to pass approximately 300 new laws every year out of the 2200 bills submitted.