Getting drivers to ignore phones
Free app tracks use and offers points and rewards to promote good behavior
If trends hold, about 3,000 people will die this year in car accidents caused by distracted drivers, many of them fiddling with their phones. That’s dangerous, often enough fatal, and yet we still refuse to put down our devices when we’re behind the wheel.
Texting is “the most alarming distraction,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, adding that “using a cellphone while driving creates enormous potential for deaths and injuries.” In 2017, the most recent year for which the NHTSA website lists complete statistics, distracted driving killed 3,166 people.
Many approaches have been tried. Smartphone makers have taken steps to discourage tapping while driving, such as automated text replies.
But Ryan Frankel thinks we can do better, and he has a vested interest in developing a solution. On a sunny summer morning in 2015, he had bicycled into the intersection of 21st Street and 10th Avenue in New York City just as a driver ran a red light while looking at his phone. Frankel swerved and avoided a direct hit, but was catapulted over the handlebars onto the pavement. He fractured his hip and elbow, and was in physical therapy for months. While rehabilitating, he started to wonder about addressing the issue.
That accident happened shortly after Frankel sold VerbalizeIt, a translation services company he had founded with Kunal Sarda in 2013.
A self-described serial entrepreneur, Frankel had been searching for a new challenge, so he began to look into the efforts of others who had hoped to curtail drivers’ cellphone use.
“I did some market research and found that most companies that had worked on solutions focused on blocking cellphone
use while driving,” he said. “It was apparent that negative approaches weren’t working, so I went the other way and sought a means to reward drivers who make the right decisions behind the wheel. My business partner, Nate Wagner, and I call it the carrot-not-the-stick approach.”
Their approach is a free app that uses the cellphone itself to discourage its use while you’re driving. It’s called This App Saves Lives, and once uploaded to a phone it remains dormant until the phone’s global positioning sensor detects that the vehicle is moving at 10 mph or faster. At that point, the app launches in the background and monitors phone use.
It can tell whether the driver uses the device for anything other than navigating the car, listening to music or receiving a hands-free phone call. In other words, it discourages reading or sending texts and email and other complex tasks such as watching a video.
Simple in operation, the app awards the driver a point for every minute driven without using the device in a detrimental way. If the cellphone is used in a way that could cause distraction, points are deducted. Points can be redeemed through the app for rewards.
Frankel said brand partners also benefited because drivers were apt to buy other goods when claiming a reward. For example, if you earn a Shake Shack milkshake, you might buy a burger too. His company is based in Philadelphia, the only place where the app has been introduced. Philadelphia businesses, Shake Shack and Urban Outfitters are participating in the effort.