The highway death toll is on the rise again. 46,000 in the United States. in 2022, up 22%, according to figures released last week. How many of those deaths are involved distracted driving?
“It’s much bigger than a data show,” said Bruce Landsberg, vice president of the National Transportation Safety Board. Data collection methods are so problematic, he said, that reliable estimates are difficult, if not impossible.
But if these methods are not improved, and soon, Landsberg said, the carnage from unsafe use of cell phones and other forms or distracted driving will continue.
“This is an epidemic,” he said. And it’s not just deaths. Everyone talks about deaths, but there are hundreds of thousands or more life-altering injuries — broken limbs, brain injuries, horrific burns. This shouldn’t happen. These incidents are not accidents. It’s completely preventable.”
Landsberg is part of the National Distracted Driving Alliance, a group formed in 2021 that is doubling down on efforts to try to fix the data problem to help convince cellphone makers, car manufacturers, software companies, legislators and distracted drivers that the problem is a public health problem. The crisis that all sides let slide.
The group is also trying to do what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s largest motor vehicle safety regulator, has been struggling to do: leverage new technologies including machine learning to better measure the prevalence of distracted driving on U.S. highways and to take them seriously. efforts to reduce it.
Lawmakers at the state and federal levels often resist stricter laws on distracted driving, said Robyn Robertson, CEO of the Traffic Injury Research Foundation, a member of the Distracted Driving Alliance. . Neither drivers nor lawmakers understand the seriousness of the problems, according to the National Defense Center.
“If we can’t show that it’s a problem, we can’t focus attention and resources on solving it,” said Robertson.
The latest available numbers from NHTSA show that of the 38,824 highway deaths in pandemic year 2020, 3,142 were due to distracted driving — less than 10%. The NHTSA has recorded 324,652 distracted driving injuries.
Among experts in the field, NHTSA’s figures are widely viewed as an underestimate. The National Distracted Driving Alliance estimates the actual numbers lie between 25% to 30%, but no one can say for sure.
The reasons are many: the country’s auto accident data system was established decades ago and has not kept pace with technological advances; Different states and different police departments collect data in different ways, sometimes still on paper accident reporting forms that don’t include checkboxes or distracted driving sections; In crash scenes, distracted driving is rarely evident, and proving someone used a mobile phone can be a long and complicated endeavour; Drivers are reluctant to admit that they were using their phones before an accident. In some cases, the driver and other witnesses may be deceased and unable to give any testimony.
According to Robertson, it’s relatively easy to tell if someone is speeding, drunk, or high. “You’re either speeding or you’re not. You’re either weak or you’re not. When it comes to distractions, it’s less obvious,” she said.
NHTSA has been studying ways to improve injury and death data collection for decades, with little progress. The Federal Safety Agency has long been criticized for appearing to put the auto industry’s concerns over public safety. Over the years, the agency declined multiple requests by The Times, including this story, to interview NHTSA leaders about the issue.
The National Transportation Safety Board, Landsberg’s agency, is a government body tasked with investigating automobile, rail, ship, and aviation accidents and making recommendations to regulators and lawmakers. It is sometimes confused with the NHTSA, which is the agency charged with regulation and enforcement.
“We can’t force anyone to do anything,” Landsberg said. Sometimes NHTSA follows NTSB recommendations, but often it doesn’t.
Distracted driving laws have been passed in many of the 50 states but differ in requirements and level of enforcement, according to the Governors Highway Safety Assn.
So the National Distracted Driving Alliance is trying to collect data from academics, other researchers, safety groups, and business operations to better identify and understand the issues involved.
In December, the group released A.I a report Packed with data from studies and surveys, including one consumer survey that showed 67% of respondents were “concerned” about using a mobile phone while driving – and about a third weren’t. Concern about texting while driving reached 80%.
The report included the results of the 2022 survey from the travelers insurance company, which showed:
- 77% said they used their phones while driving
- 74% used mobile phone maps
- 56% have read a text or email
- 27% of social media has been updated or checked
- 19% – 1 in 5 – shop online while driving.
The report also showed some progress being made with new technologies that have been mostly ignored by government regulators.
One is to use video cameras and machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, to assess the prevalence of mobile phone driver distraction in real time. The systems look at the windshields of passing cars and assess whether or not someone is using their phone.
The systems mask individual faces and other signs and collect data to assess directions and, their makers say, are not used to make a legal case against individual drivers.
“We’re designing the privacy protections in the system, for researchers to use,” said Josh Graver, CEO of PathZero.ai, a Boston company affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Video recordings are deleted once they are no longer needed.
Other companies do what safety advocates wish cell phone companies do: disable most driver-distracting features in the phone or in-vehicle infotainment system while the vehicle is running.
“The phone companies and the tech companies, they’re the ones who created this problem, they can fix it if they want to,” Landsberg said. And automakers, too: “They’re putting 14-inch screens” in the car, he said. “Where do you think the driver will look?”
A company called NoCell Technologies in Aliso Viejo sells its services to commercial fleets that have high incentives to enforce safe driving among their employees: companies with deep pockets are more likely to be sued when their distracted employees or contractors crash.
The NoCell system can disable phone or phone features entirely, and report if, when and for how long the driver has been using the phone.
Drivers “don’t hear hums, beeps, or sounds while the car is moving, so they don’t reach for the phone and look down causing accidents,” Corey Woinarowicz, NoCell’s chief revenue officer, said. “Technology has got us into this mess and technology is going to have to get us out of this mess.”
Of course, drivers themselves can discipline themselves against dangerous phone use, but that would require an honest self-assessment of personal behavior and willpower not to respond to temptation — which seems unlikely to happen on a large scale.
“We tell ourselves this is always happening to someone else,” Landsberg said, which leads to the conclusion that “this is not a problem.”
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