Bloomberg
Amid
a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of
distracted driving are getting worse.
By
Kyle Stock,
Lance Lambert, and
David Ingold
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.
“He was
remorseful,” Smith, now 43, said. “He never changed his story.”
Yet in
federal records, the death isn’t attributed to distraction or mobile-phone use.
It’s just another line item on the grim annual toll taken by the National
Highway Transportation Safety Administration [NHTSA]—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. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every
day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that
grim toll in a decade. 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
to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android
phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81
percent.
Finally, the
increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and
pedestrians—all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than,
say, a 4,000-pound SUV—especially if you’re glancing up from your
phone rather than concentrating on the road. 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 phones—that’s just 1.4 percent of all traffic
fatalities. By that measure, drunk driving is 23 times more deadly than using a
phone while driving, though studies have shown that both activities behind the
wheel constitute (on average) a similar level of impairment. NHTSA has yet to
fully crunch its 2016 data, but the agency said deaths tied to distraction
actually declinedlast year.
There are
many reasons to believe mobile phones are far deadlier than NHTSA spreadsheets
suggest. Some of the biggest indicators are within the data itself. In more
than half of 2015 fatal crashes, motorists were simply going straight down the
road—no crossing traffic, rainstorms, or blowouts. Meanwhile, drivers involved
in accidents increasingly mowed down things smaller than a Honda Accord, such
as pedestrians or cyclists, many of whom occupy the side of the road or
the sidewalk next to it. Fatalities increased inordinately among motorcyclists
(up 6.2 percent in 2016) and pedestrians (up 9 percent).
“Honestly, I
think the real number of fatalities tied to cell phones is at least three times
the federal figure,” Jennifer Smith said. “We’re all addicted and the scale of
this is unheard of.”
In a recent study (PDF), 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.
Perhaps more telling are the findings of Zendrive Inc., a San
Francisco startup that analyzes smartphone data to help insurers of commercial
fleets assess safety risks. In a study of 3 million people, it found drivers
using their mobile phone during 88 percent of trips. The true number is
probably even higher because Zendrive didn’t capture instances when phones
were mounted in a fixed position—so-called hands free technology, which is also considered dangerous.“It’s
definitely frightening,” said Jonathan Matus, Zendrive’s co-founder and chief
executive officer. “Pretty much everybody is using their phone while driving.”
There are, by now, myriad technological
nannies that freeze smartphone activity. Most notably, a recent version of
Apple’s iOS operating system can be configured to keep a phone asleep when its
owner is driving and to send an automated text response to incoming messages.
However, the “Do Not Disturb” function can
be overridden by the person trying to get in touch. More critically, safety
advocates note that such systems require an opt-in from the same users who have
difficulty ignoring their phones in the first place.
In NHTSA’s
defense, its tally of mobile phone-related deaths is only as good as
the data it gets from individual states, each of which has its own methods for
diagnosing and detailing the cause of a crash. Each state in turn relies on its
various municipalities to compile crash metrics—and they often do things
differently, too.
The data
from each state is compiled from accident reports filed by local police, most
of which don’t prompt officers to consider mobile phone distraction as an
underlying cause. Only 11 states use reporting forms that contain a field for
police to tick-off mobile-phone distraction, while 27 have a space to note
distraction in general as a potential cause of the accident.
The fine
print seems to make a difference. Tennessee, for example, has one of the
most thorough accident report forms in the country, a document that asks
police to evaluate both distractions in general and mobile phones in
particular. Of the 448 accidents involving a phone in 2015 as reported by
NHTSA, 84 occurred in Tennessee. That means, a state with 2 percent of the
country’s population accounted for 19 percent of its phone-related driving
deaths. As in polling, it really depends on how you ask the question.
Massachusetts
State Police Sergeant Christopher Sanchez, a national expert on distracted
driving, said many police departments still focus on drinking or drug use when
investigating a crash. Also, figuring out whether a mobile phone was in use at
the time of a crash is usually is getting trickier every day—proving that it
precipitated the event can be even harder to do.
Prosecutors
have a similar bias. Currently, it’s illegal for drivers to use a handheld
phone at all in 15 states, and texting while driving is specifically barred in
47 states. But getting mobile phone records after a crash typically involves a
court order and, and even then, the records may not show much activity beyond a
call or text. If police provide solid evidence of speeding, drinking, drugs or
some other violation, lawyers won’t bother pursuing distraction as a cause.
“Crash
investigators are told to catch up with this technology phenomenon—and it’s
hard,” Sanchez said. “Every year new apps are developed that make it even more
difficult.” Officers in Arizona and Montana, meanwhile, don’t have to
bother, since they allow mobile phone use while you drive. And in Missouri,
police only have to monitor drivers under age 21 who pick up their phone while
driving.
Like Smith,
Emily Stein, 36, lost a parent to the streets. Ever since her father was killed
by a distracted driver in 2011, she sometimes finds herself doing unscientific
surveys. She’ll sit in front of her home in the suburbs west of Boston and
watch how many passing drivers glance down at their phones.
“I tell my
local police department: ‘If you come here, sit on my stoop and hand out
tickets. You’d generate a lot of revenue,’” she said.
Since
forming the Safe Roads Alliance five years ago, Stein talks to the police
regularly. “A lot of them say it surpasses drunk driving at this point,” she
said. Meanwhile, grieving families and safety advocates such as her
are still struggling to pass legislation mandating hands-free-only use
of phones while driving—Iowa and Texas just got around
to banning texting behind the wheel.
“The
argument is always that it’s big government,” said Jonathan Adkins, executive
director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. “The other issue is that
… it’s hard to ban something that we all do, and we know that we want to do.”
Safety
advocates such as Smith say lawmakers, investigators and
prosecutors won’t prioritize the danger of mobile phones in vehicles until
they are seen as a sizable problem—as big as drinking, say. Yet, it won’t be
measured as such until it’s a priority for lawmakers, investigators and
prosecutors.
“That’s the
catch-22 here,” Smith said. “We all know what’s going on, but we don’t have a
breathalyzer for a phone.”
Perhaps the lawmakers who vote against curbing phone use in cars
should watch the heart-wrenching 36-minute documentary filmmaker
Werner Herzog made on the subject. Laudably, the piece, From One Second to the Next, was
bankrolled by the country’s major cellular companies. “It’s not just an
accident,” Herzog said of the fatalities.
“It’s a new form of culture coming at us, and it’s coming with great
vehemence.”
Adkins has watched smartphone culture overtake much of his work in 10
years at the helm of the GHSA, growing increasingly frustrated with the
mounting death toll and what he calls clear underreporting of mobile phone
fatalities. But he doesn’t think the numbers will come down until a
backlash takes hold, one where it’s viewed as shameful to drive while
using a phone. Herzog’s documentary, it appears, has had little effect in its
four years on YouTube.com. At this point, Adkins is simply holding out for
gains in autonomous driving technology.
“I use the cocktail
party example,” he explained. “If you’re at a cocktail party and say, ‘I was so
hammered the other day, and I got behind the wheel,’ people will be outraged.
But if you say the same thing about using a cell phone, it won’t be a big deal.
It is still acceptable, and that’s the problem.”
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