by Mobile phones can track what we say and write, where we go, what we buy and what we search on the internet. But they’re still not being used to track one of the biggest public health threats: crashes caused by phone-distracted drivers.
More than a decade after federal and state governments seized on the dangers of cell phone use while driving and began enacting laws to stop it, there is still no definitive database of the number of accidents or deaths caused by mobile phone distractions. Safety experts say current estimates likely do not reflect a worsening problem.
Lack of clear data comes with increasing collisions. Car crashes recorded by police increased 16% from 2020 to 2021, to 16,700 per day from 14,400 per day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. In 2021, nearly 43,000 Americans died in accidents, a 16-year high.
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In 2021, only 377 fatal crashes – just under 1% – were reported to have involved a driver distracted by a mobile phone, according to the traffic agency. About 8% of the 2.5 million non-fatal crashes that year involved cell phones, according to highway agency data.
But those figures don’t capture all of mobile phone distraction; they only include crashes where that distraction is specifically mentioned in the police report. Often, safety experts said, cell phone use is not mentioned in such reports because it usually depends on admitting a distracted driver, a witness to identify him or, in even rarer cases, the use of phone records. pocket or other phone forensics that conclusively show distraction.
Police can access cell phone records, but that’s a very difficult process that requires a subpoena to protect drivers’ privacy. Even then, further analysis is required to link the driver’s phone activity to the time of the accident.
“That analysis is expensive, and if the police don’t really think there’s a criminal case, they don’t do it,” said Dr. David Strayer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Utah and an expert on the science of driver distraction. He added that “unless someone uses the phone to cheat, the police don’t consider it a factor.”
Safety experts said the current data was unscientific and inaccurate.
“It’s definitely an understatement, because people don’t like to admit things like that,” said Jake Nelson, director of Traffic Safety Research & Advocacy for AAA. “It’s very frustrating to me that we don’t have access to better data, especially now that we’re at a 16-year high,” he said, referring to traffic deaths.
The NHTSA acknowledged that there was significant underreporting of distraction when crashes occurred. In a statement provided to the New York Times, the agency said it was “actively conducting studies to examine the ability to measure the prevalence of distraction on the road.”
Distracted drivers may not admit to the police, but they do admit to the behavior in anonymous surveys. In a 2022 nationally representative survey, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that about 20% of drivers said they regularly scrolled through social media, read email, played games, watched videos or recording and posting them while driving.
The data, published in the Journal of Safety Research, found that 50% of drivers admitted to being distracted by a device in the past 30 days. Research also shows that drivers who engage in such tasks by taking their hands off the wheel and taking their eyes and attention off the road face an increased risk of an accident; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that “at 55 mph, sending or reading a text is like driving the length of a football field with your eyes closed.”
“People who use their devices regularly are minimizing the risks,” said Aimee Cox, a research scientist for the highway safety institute who was a contributing author of the paper in the Journal of Safety Research. She added that it can be relatively easy for the public to minimize the risks when there is no clear database or source of information that makes it clear how many crashes and deaths the behavior causes.
“I wonder if that is helping to reduce the risks,” she said.
From a technological standpoint, phones are able to link the time of a car accident with the way the driver was using the phone at the time, Strayer said. That’s because phones are equipped with sensors and other tracking and surveillance technology that are typically used for marketing, tracking and other functions.
“Your phone leaves a lot of breadcrumbs, but no one is looking at them,” he said.
Strayer, who consults on criminal and civil cases involving evasive driving, said he has consulted in the past two months on deaths where the police did not do cell phone forensics, “but I could get the current phone data use to show definitive use.”
Privacy laws limit the cellphone data that can be collected on crashes, even as the phones collect all sorts of other information on their users, Nelson said.
A number of ideas are being used that could help curb reckless driving without impinging on civil liberties. One idea, Nelson said, would be to use roadside cameras that identify drivers who are looking at their phones or are otherwise distracted and automatically notify police officers more further up the road. Roadside and highway cameras are already used to identify speeding drivers.
A study published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in October found that cameras are “a reasonably accurate approach to measuring the prevalence of cell phone distractions on the road.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
