Legislature gets another bill to fight distracted driving. In the meantime, change your settings.

Most people aren’t aware of it because it’s seldom enforced, but Florida does have a texting-while-driving law. And hopefully next year we’ll get a real texting-while-driving law.

The Senate Committee on Communications, Education and Public Utilities gave its OK to more enforceable texting legislation Tuesday by a 7-1 vote. The bill still has a lot more committee stops ahead. None of the texting bills filed last session made any progress.

Even getting the current, feeble law on the books took five years before for it passed in 2013. By then, 40 other states already acted.

In Florida, texting while driving is a secondary offense. That means if a cop sees a driver texting while in traffic, that person can’t be pulled over and ticketed unless they’re doing something else wrong. A primary offense, on the other hand, means if police see it, they can act on it.

If the bulb is burnt out over your license plate, that’s a primary offense. You can be pulled over. I can personally attest to this. But you can’t be pulled over for texting while rolling down the road. Yet which is more dangerous to everyone around you?

The law is looser in Florida than most states. Texting behind the wheel is a secondary offense for adult drivers in four states including Florida. It’s a primary offense in 43 states. And 15 states say adult drivers can’t use handheld cellphones at all when driving.

In 2016, law enforcement in Volusia and Flagler handed out a grand total of 24 texting-while-driving citations, up from 22 the year before. Secondary status means this is lightly enforced.

And this is where one should point out the obvious: People are terrible at multitasking. And the people who believe they’re amazingly adept at doing five things at once often are the scariest people on the road.

If you’re texting, you are not looking around you. And lots of exciting things may be happening there at any moment.

Road fatalities per million people in Florida have been rising since 2013. There are lots of theories why, but more distracted drivers is a good guess. A study of statewide crash reports by The Palm Beach Post last June found that crashes with distracted driving as factor climbed 10 percent between 2015 and 2016. Injuries in those crashes increased 16 percent. Deaths rose 13 percent.

In the meantime, know that if you have an iPhone, the recently released version of the operating system has a feature that blocks incoming texts and alerts while you drive.

It’s tempting to reach for the phone when something is incoming. Me, I hear that ping and assume something horrible has just happened in my life. I expect to read, “The cat has set the house on fire, but don’t worry, she’s not hurt” or something like that. I’m on edge until I see what’s there.

So it’s best not to know what’s coming in until you get to where you’re going.

The new setting also warns you if you try to input anything. A useful reminder to put the thing down.

Go to the settings and click on the little blue “do not disturb” square, then scroll down to “do not disturb while driving” to turn it on.

I thought I never looked at texts except at stoplights (allowed under Florida’s law). But since I turned this feature on, I realized I make more exceptions than I thought.

Yes, this technological fix shouldn’t be necessary. For that matter, a law shouldn’t be necessary. But people being people, we need to be pushed to prevent us from doing stupid things while driving.