Evidence linking smartphone use to crashes mounts
Government data on traffic fatalities doesn’t capture danger of making and taking calls or texting while driving
Jennifer Smith doesn’t like the term “accident.” It implies too much chance and too little culpability.
A “crash” killed her mother in 2008, she insists, when her car was broadsided by another vehicle while on her way to pick up cat food. The other driver, a 20-year-old college student, ran a red light while talking on his mobile phone, a distraction that he immediately admitted and cited as the catalyst of the fatal event.
Yet in federal records, the death isn’t attributed to distraction or mobilephone use. It’s just another line item on the grim annual toll taken by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration — one of 37,262 that year.
Three months later, Smith quit her job as a Realtor and formed Stopdistractions.org, a nonprofit lobbying and support group. Her intent was to make the tragic loss of her mother an anomaly.
To that end, she has been wildly unsuccessful. Nine years later, the problem of death-by-distraction has gotten much worse.
Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.
There are however three big clues, and they don’t rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014-16, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.
The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the order of the day — all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice.
Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians. Last year, 5,987 pedestrians were killed by cars in the U.S., almost 1,100 more than in 2014 — that’s a 22 percent increase in just two years.
Safety regulators and law enforcement officials certainly understand the danger of taking — or making — a phone call while operating a piece of heavy machinery. They still, however, have no idea just how dangerous it is, because the data just isn’t easily obtained. And as mobile phone traffic continues to shift away from simple voice calls and texts to encrypted social networks, officials increasingly have less of a clue than ever before.
Out of NHTSA’s full 2015 dataset, only 448 deaths were linked to mobile phone — that’s just 1.4 percent of all traffic fatalities.
In a recent study, the nonprofit National Safety Council found only about half of fatal crashes tied to known mobile phone use were coded as such in NHTSA databases.
In other words, according to the NSC, NHTSA’s figures for distraction-related death are too low.