Sitting in the passenger seat next to her husband on their ride to Duluth a week and a half ago, Janey Palmer of Edina watched as the car up ahead swerved along Interstate 35W.

"As we caught up to it, I saw that the driver was texting, driving and smoking a cigarette at the same time!" she said. "We were very glad to be able to pull ahead -- and away -- from her, but shudder to think what could happen."

Death is one of the things that can happen, and outrage is growing nationwide as the task of actually driving takes a back seat to text-messaging, phoning, GPSing and searching for songs on handheld devices. Wednesday morning, federal officials, transportation experts and academics are convening in Washington, D.C., for a first-ever summit on how to combat distracted driving.

But while distracted driving is becoming accepted as a safety problem, the sources of the distraction are becoming accepted as the way most Americans behave. "Drivers are overestimating their ability to multi-task," said Cheri Marti, director of the state's Office of Traffic Safety. "That's, I believe, a cultural, societal challenge to change our attitude," she said, similar to the way drinking and driving have become a less acceptable combination.

Drivers talking on the phone are four times as likely to crash as those focused on driving, yielding the same odds as someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent, said David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah. Drivers who text are twice as likely to crash as someone who's intoxicated, said Strayer, who has researched distracted driving for more than a decade.

"We have laws in every one of the states saying you can't drive with a certain blood alcohol level," he said. "Yet your crash risk is the same when you're talking on the phone and somehow we allow that."

In Minnesota, it's against the law to send text messages, read e-mail or surf the Internet while driving. Seventeen other states have similar laws, and the weekend before last, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., joined the voices calling for a national ban on texting behind the wheel. She will be speaking at today's summit.

Minnesota also forbids teens and school bus drivers from talking on cell phones, and more rules could be coming.

"I would completely ban cell phones out of cars," said state Sen. Steve Murphy, who heads the transportation committee, "but one, that bill would never pass. Two, I think it might be a little bit of overkill. But I can tell you for sure that we're going to pass a hands-free bill," one that would ban drivers from using hand-held phones and require them to use headsets or other devices.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is not prepared to support such a measure, said spokesman Brian McClung, who noted that traffic fatalities are at their lowest level in decades even as cell-phone use increases.

"In addition, studies show that using a hands-free device does not increase safety -- it is the act of talking on a phone while driving that can create a distraction, not holding the phone with your hand," McClung said. "We need to consider the limits of having government involved in every aspect of our lives and should balance safety concerns with convenience and common sense."

Collier White of Minneapolis would agree.

"I am an entrepreneur, and I run a small business from inside my car," said White, who says he's an independent limousine driver. "In four years taking phone calls and writing down information on a sticky pad while driving, I've never been at fault in an accident."

He has, however, been hit by other cars that have run stop signs or made illegal turns.

"In my opinion, distracted drivers drive better because they are less apt to become angry, they are less impatient," he said. "They are half-focused on their phone call or their radio, their conversation or even their text message. They are confident of their driving skills and knowledgeable about their surroundings."

That confidence is misplaced, said Strayer, the Utah professor. His latest research, to be presented in November, indicates that just 2 percent of people can talk on the phone without impairment, but most people believe they drive just fine.

"We all think we're in the 2 percent," he said. "That can't be. We're not all from Lake Wobegon. We're not all above average."

Admitting to the problem

In Minnesota, one-fourth of crashes have distractions as a main cause, but "it's seriously underreported," Marti said.

"It is challenging to enforce this simply because drivers are not going to admit to being on their cell phone, or texting or accessing the Web or reading their e-mail," she said. But in the investigation of a serious or fatal crash, "it's going to be discovered." Authorities can obtain cell phone records via court order, "and that's becoming more and more common. ... Sometimes the actual phones are seized at the scene for investigative purposes."

Some drivers do come clean, such as the drunken 25-year-old near Walker, Minn., who told the State Patrol last year that he crossed the center line because he was sending a text message, just two days after the ban took effect. In a high-profile 2007 crash that killed two Minnetonka High School girls, a passenger who survived helped authorities determine that the driver was scrolling on an iPod.

"We've always gotten bored driving -- it's not all that cognitively taxing. That's why we listen to radios," said Edward Schiappa, chair of the communication studies department at the University of Minnesota. "What's changed is that now we have this source of gratification right there."

Communicating is pleasurable, and being highly wired brings an accelerated sense of time, he said, so "we don't want to wait 20 minutes to respond to an e-mail."

Technology to the rescue?

"This is not a new topic," said Michael Manser, who's attending the Washington summit in his role as director of the Human FIRST program at the U's Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute. Between World War I and World War II, he said, aircraft became increasingly sophisticated, so much so that fighter pilots had a difficult time keeping track of the instrumentation. Cockpits were redesigned to be more manageable, and Manser thinks it's probably time to give cars a similar streamlining.

He said that requiring hands-free phones is "a really good first step" toward safety because it takes care of two physical distractions: hands get to stay on the wheel, and eyes get to stay on the road. But it doesn't solve the problem of cognitive distraction -- even a person thinking about a phone number or a voice-recognition menu isn't giving his or her full attention to the vehicle up ahead that's beginning to brake.

Distraction is "a multiheaded dragon," he said.

One weapon in the battle may be more technology, such as super-precise GPS units that alert drivers when they're straying across lane markers or detectors that make the accelerator harder to push when a vehicle gets too close to the one in front of it.

None of those, however, will address one of the most obvious human factors: people who are in the car with the driver, who appear to pose less of a distraction than people on the other end of the phone.

"What we think we see with passengers is that they can moderate their level of talking ... based on the situation that's developing in front of the driver," said Manser, but more research is needed.

jfoti@startribune.com • 612-673-4491 jross@startribune.com • 612-673-7168