Board chairman Deborah Hersman acknowledged the recommendation will be unpopular with many people and that complying would involve what has become ingrained behavior for many Americans.
While the National Transportation Safety Board does not have the power to impose restrictions, its recommendations carry significant weight with federal regulators and congressional and state lawmakers. Another recommendation issued yesterday urges states to aggressively enforce current bans on text messaging and the use of cellphones and other portable electronic devices while driving.
“We’re not here to win a popularity contest,’’ she said. “No e-mail, no text, no update, no call is worth a human life.’’
Currently, Massachusetts and 34 other states ban texting while driving and some bar cellphone use or e-mailing with hand-held devices. But enforcement is generally not a high priority, and no states ban the use of hands-free devices.
The immediate impetus for the recommendation of state bans was a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Mo., last year in which a 19-year-old pickup driver sent and received a flurry of texts just before the crash.
Safety board investigators said they are seeing increasing texting, cellphone calls, and other distracting behavior by drivers in crashes involving all kinds of transportation. It has become routine to immediately request the preservation of cellphone and texting records when an investigation is begun.
In the past few years the board has investigated a train collision in which the engineer was texting that killed 25 people in Chatsworth, Calif.; a fatal crash on the Delaware River near Philadelphia in which a tugboat pilot was talking on his cellphone and using a laptop computer, and a Northwest Airlines flight that sped more than 100 miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their laptops.
Last year, a driver was dialing his cellphone when his truck crossed a highway median near Munford, Ind., and collided with a 15-passenger van. Eleven people were killed.
