Senate panel votes to ban driver texting

CARSON CITY -- A bill to prohibit motorists, including police and emergency personnel, from text-messaging on cell phones while behind the wheel won committee approval Friday and now moves to the full Nevada Senate.

Senate Energy, Infrastructure and Transportation Committee members voted unanimously to pass Senate Bill 136, which would ban drivers from writing, sending or reading a text message while operating a vehicle.

The bill doesn't ban reading a telephone number or contact entry on a cell phone if making or receiving a call.

"We need to make our roads safer," Sen. Shirley Breeden, D-Henderson, the bill's primary author, said in urging the committee to endorse the bill.

After the bill's original wording was criticized as too broad, it was amended to limit the ban on text-messaging to when a vehicle "is in motion or stopped at an intersection that is controlled by a traffic-control signal."

Under the measure, violators would be fined $20 for a first offense, $50 for a second offense and $100 for each one thereafter. The citations wouldn't count as moving violations.