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Drivers Look at their Phones on 88 Percent of Trips

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:47AM   
from the just-project-camera-views-onto-the-phone dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Zendrive makes technology that monitors how people are driving, so they took the data from 3 million drivers taking 570 million trips over 5.6 billion miles. They found that drivers used their phones for an average of three and a half minutes in 88 out of a hundred trips. From their study:

Everyday, that’s the equivalent of people behind the wheel talking or texting on 5.6-million car rides from our sample alone. When extrapolated for the entire U.S. driving population, the number goes up to roughly 600-million distracted trips a day….This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.

One can download PDFs of the full report and the executive summary.

So that explains the steady stream of accidents despite the prevalence of anti-lock brakes, cameras, and accident avoidance features in passenger vehicles.

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Original Submission

• Selection Bias? (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:31PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:31PM (#499329)

  There seems to be several problems with the methodology.

  • All of the participants of this study are smartphone users, because the study was conducted using smartphone apps. So extrapolating to all drivers (which the study authors do) is fallacious.
  • In particular, even among smartphone users, if the driver did not bring their phone with them for a drive, it is not counted.
  • The method of determining whether the phone owner is driving (which side of the car the phone is on and/or which side of the car the phone uses to exit the car) is flawed because most cars have passenger seats behind the driver.
  • I also don't think the driver-versus-passenger method can reliably distinguish between a driver using their own phone while driving, and a passenger using the driver's phone.

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