During the pandemic, distracted driving increased, and it hasn’t gone down since.
Until relatively recently, good data on the problem of distracted driving has been hard to find. The government estimates that 3,522 people died because of it in 2021, but experts say the official number probably majorly undercounts the number of deaths, in part because police are rarely able to definitively prove that a driver was distracted right before a crash.
In the last few years, though, the data on distracted driving has gotten better. Cambridge Mobile Telematics is a company that partners with major insurance companies to offer downloadable apps that drivers can use to save money on their rates. Via the apps, Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) uses mobile phone sensors to measure driving behavior, including whether a person is speeding, holding their phone, or interacting with an unlocked screen while driving (the company says it doesn’t collect information on what the drivers are doing on their phones). Its work gives the company insight into the driving behaviors of more than 10 million people.
CMT recently analyzed driver behavior during millions of car trips. What it found should be troubling to anyone who uses a road in the US: During the pandemic, American drivers got even more distracted by their phones while driving. The amount of distracted driving hasn’t receded, even as life has mostly stabilized.
Invariably, when I’m on Lincoln Drive in Philly and someone is swerving between both lanes, they are on their cell phone either holding it in their hand to talk or reading and responding to texts.
If you’re not familiar with Lincoln Drive, it’s a winding, twisting road with two lanes in each direction, with a drop to a stream on one side and a rise up a hill on the other.
There’s no shoulder at all for most of the way, so nowhere to go if you’re tailgating and something happens. People are always tailgating. The speed limit is 25mph, but you almost never see traffic going less than 35mph.