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Drivers Look at their Phones on 88 Percent of Trips

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:14PM (#499398)

    1) Using a GPS navigation program like Google Maps or Waze. Do you really want people to go back to the days of trying to read paper maps while driving?

    False dichotomy.

    2) Person is a passenger (since it's using the sensors to determine "trips"). What kind of moron thinks a passenger shouldn't be using their phone?

    Nobody is. TFA describes their methodology, and the app is supposed to distinguish between passenger and driver use. That being said, I do believe their method is unreliable (as explained elsethread) which does call the results into question.

    3) Driver is stopped at a red light.

    Attentiveness is still required from drivers in this situation. A study like this is right to include such usage.

    4) Driver is talking on the phone, using the phone's Bluetooth feature combined with the car's BT hands-free calling system.

    Hands-free usage presumably does not count as handling.

    Does this stupid study also count the usage of a car's built-in nav system as "phone use"? If not, why not?

    It does not count. This study limits itself specifically to smartphone use. That's fine—even though multiple factors contribute to driver distraction it's reasonable to ask questions about specific issues.