As you drive along the highway you may see a makeshift memorial on the side of the road, marking the place where a loved one died in a fatal accident. As traffic fatalities have risen, so has the number of memorials.
Curiously, many of these roadside memorials are on straight, lightly traveled four-lane roads and aren’t anywhere near an intersection. What, you might ask, caused this fatal accident?
You won’t find definitive answers in government data, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been investigating the role of distracted driving and in particular cellphones.
According to Ian Reagan, senior research scientist at IIHS, around 3,350 people were killed in all distraction-related crashes and 382 died in crashes involving cell phone use in 2021.
“But those numbers are almost certainly underestimates, as surviving drivers often don’t admit they were looking at their phone and police can’t always tell what deceased ones were doing before they crashed,” Reagan reported in 2023.
Reagan cites a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report based on a large naturalistic driving study that suggests the real death toll from all types of distraction could be as much as three times as high, and cell phones themselves could be implicated in as many as 6% of all crashes.
National Safety Council white paper
The National Safety Council agrees that cellphone-related accidents are under-reported. The Council produced this white paper to help the public understand distracted driving and also produced a video with a survivor’s first-hand account.
The good news is that cellphone use behind the wheel may be declining. A study shows that over the last 10 years, the prevalence of drivers using hand-held cell phones at any given daylight moment has decreased from 4.6% of drivers in 2013 to 2.1% in 2022.
The study is from the National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS) conducted by NHTSA, which is the only national estimate of driver cell phone use based on driver observations.
However, the same study suggests there is a lot of room for improvement. The percentage of drivers using hand-held electronic devices has increased by 82%, from 1.7% in 2013 to 3.1% in 2022. Among other activities, this activity includes text messaging, causing a driver to take their eyes off the road.