Despite Well Known Risks, Survey Finds Most People Use Smartphones While Driving (cbslocal.com)

From a report: Everyone knows it's dangerous, but a lot of people are still doing it -- driving while distracted. In a survey of 3-million motorists, almost 9 out of 10 admitted to using their smartphone behind the wheel. According to a report by Zendrive, which studied device use among 3.1 million drivers over 5.6 billion miles of driving, in 88 percent of trips, drivers made at least some use of their phones. On average, they spent more than three-minute on the phone.

Comments

I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[redmid17]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what?

All of those still happen in spades are for the most part of impossible to eradicate. With a combination of education, training (eg no passengers in the car for 3 months) and penalties, we can reduce them like the world has done for drunken driving, but people will continue to use their phones while they drive just like they've let other things distract them as long as cars have existed. The only real differentiator is that the phone lets us combine nearly everything into a handheld distraction as opposed to having 10 different proximate causes.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Nkwe]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what? The only real differentiator is that the phone lets us combine nearly everything into a handheld distraction as opposed to having 10 different proximate causes.

Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving. Compare the phone to the climate control or radio controls in a car. The radio controls are in a fixed place on the dash and possibly also on the steering wheel. The radio controls typically have some sort of tactile feedback that you can use without looking at them. With a smart phone, it is not in a predictable location (your hand, the seat, a holder in the dash, your pocket, maybe the floor). With a smart phone, you can not operate it without looking at it (phone may be locked, the app you need may not be on the screen, no real buttons with tactile feedback, etc.) Smart phone screens are typically much smaller (in size and font) than are the radio and native car controls.

Smart phone interfaces are not specifically designed for driving, where the native car controls are. Sure, some newer cars are going to screen based interfaces, and this is a bad trend, but at least these screens are mounted to the dash and car companies have some responsibility (and potential liability) around making these interfaces non-distracting, whereas smart phone manufactures do not.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Solandri]

This is the problem I have with most arguments against autonomous cars. People always want to compare them against a completely attentive and alert human driver who completely understands every hypothetical situation. Not against the statistical average human driver who has 0.5 seconds to grok the situation and react before an accident occurs.

In a way I can understand it. If you can do better than humans in the human's best case, then you can do better than humans in all cases. But it just perpetuates the flawed reasoning most people use of making decisions based only on the best or worst case (e.g. winning the lottery, plane crashes, nuclear accidents). The real fix is to educate people to do these broad-band comparisons based on statistical average, not based on outliers.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those cases where we're fighting against reality, instead of dealing with it. What this study shows is that people really, really want to make calls (and probably texts and messages etc) while driving their cars. So what we need to do, instead of trying to stop them from doing it, is provide technology that makes it easy for them to do these things safely. For a start, we ought to mandate that all cars have a certain minimum standard of hands-free phone kit, that can be controlled without taking the hands off the wheel or eyes far from the dash - it's not rocket science, the technology has been around for ages, we just need standards to be set, and insurance companies encouraged to increase premiums for cars lacking certified kit.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Dorianny]

What surprises me is that they need a study to tell this. Just look around, everyone who owns a damn cell phone is using it at some point while driving. At every red light, you can see at least 1/2 driver looking at their phone. Best way to catch them: cops in buses to spot them. And best way to deter them: higher ticket price.

People tend to not follow laws that they think are irrational, and most people think that prohibiting checking the phone while the car is at a complete stop, is stupid. Want to make things safer, then require the gear be placed in [Parked]. I don't know about other states but in NY you can get be ticketed while parked at the curb if the engine is running. The Laws in this case should strike a balance that minimizes risk and provides the most benefit, rather then idealism that in practice is wildly ignored

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[cayenne8]

Actually, it also assumes that laws against using a phone in the car are universal, and in the US, they vary by state to state.

I believe in my state, it is against the law to text and drive, however, you are fully free to talk on the phone all you want while driving.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[omfglearntoplay]

Agreed. Cell phones are too prolific... hands free tech should be in all modern vehicles. I will say that dialing should be made better. In my car, I click a button the steering wheel then with another button on the wheel I scroll and pick one of my 6 main contacts. If they aren't on that list, I can't be bothered with it. Voice activation is nice in theory, but never works for phone calls in my car the way it should. Strangely enough voice navigation works well enough to use.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Orgasmatron]

Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving. Compare the phone to the climate control or radio controls in a car.

You must have a very cheap and/or very old car. In new cars, pretty much everything above the very bottom of the line is a usability nightmare. Think touchscreens and/or "dynamic" buttons (rows of featureless buttons next to a LCD that displays the current function). Oh, and then there is the shuttle control where you twist and depress a knob to navigate a maze of twisty menus, all alike.

Smart phones at least have the advantage that (when you aren't worried about people seeing you use your phone in the car) you can bring it to your field of driving vision, rather than having to turn your head and sometimes lean your body over to see what you are about to press.

Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents. I've seen some conjecture that the people who are prone to distraction will find something to distract them, and the problem should be addressed by working with those specific drivers, and not by chasing after the distraction that happens to be most popular at the moment. It will probably take several more years of data to clarify that. (And our data isn't trustworthy, but that is a rant for another day.)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[countach74]

We also need to consider what happens when those laws are passed. In my state, it's illegal to use your phone while driving. Calls are permitted with a headset only. So do people stop using their phones? Not at all. They just keep their phone out of sight to try to avoid a ticket, which is even worse. Now, rather than bringing the phone up where one can see the phone and the road at the same time, people are looking down in their laps, taking their eyes off the road.

People will, for the most part, do what they want to do. Changing behavior is very difficult and laws are often quite ineffective at affecting the change desired. I'm not saying we should just accept that people will always use phones or that it's OK to do so, but a lot of times the "solutions" are worse than the problems they intend to solve. Also I'd love to see safety data regarding cell phones in regions that have strict laws vs. those that don't. Everything I've outlined has just been from personal observations and anecdotes.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[AthanasiusKircher]

Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents.

I'm not going to call you "nasty things," because you're basically right that stats don't appear to be "way up." BUT it also depends on what stats you use. You're right that "distracted driving" stats are always hard to estimate.

What we do know: overall number of crashes (including fatalities, non-fatal injuries, and property-damage-only crashes) basically had been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, when we had nearly 7 million crashes/year in the U.S. This trend lasted until ~2010, when it got down to ~5.5 million/year.

For some reason total crashes have been steadily rising again, from a low of 5.3 million in 2011 up to 6.3 million in 2015.

Granted, total number of injuries and fatalities have thankfully not been rising at the same rate (though they are rising again too), but for some reason total CRASHES have been going up quickly. (That is, particularly crashes with no significant injuries.)

The official reports say that cell phone distractions have been steadily rising, though they only claim to account for around 2% of distraction-caused accidents in 2005 rising up to 8% of distraction-caused accidents in 2015. That is obviously a significant rise in that category, but I don't know how those numbers are estimated -- and still only accounts for (according to the report) 69,000 crashes in 2015, which is only about 1% of total crashes.

But I think we need to ask -- if total crashes have risen by ~20% in the past 5 years, after >15 years of steady declines (despite increased total miles driven), why? Drunk driving numbers have generally been continuing to decline. Are drivers really just that much more reckless in general than they were a few years ago? Are the reports estimating things that poorly? Are people suddenly reporting more accidents for some reason? Or could there be some more specific reasons why we're now seeing ~1 million more crashes per year than 5 years ago?

Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phones -can- be used safely in a car. You just have to know that you need to prioritize tasks. In aviation we say "aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order" This means fly the plane first, worry about where youre going second, and talking to people is a distant third. ATC knows this, & theyre fine with it if it takes you a minute or two to respond, do what you gotta, just be safe.

Its the same in the car "hold on a second while i navigate this intersection" and PUT THE PHONE DOWN until youre back on a straight stretch.

Or just put the thing down & when you pick it back up, "hey mom, sorry i had to put the phone down to change lanes". She will understand, trust me.

"Hey this is not a good time to discuss (very complex or emotional topic), let me get to my destination and I'll call you back."

The problem we're having is that our reaction to it so far has been to just outlaw it & write tickets. This isnt going to work any better than "just say no" or "abstinence-only" education. People ARE going to do this, they just are, youre not going to stop them. Since that is the case, the best thing we can do is educate them on how to do it responsibly, and to also put some effort into updating our unwritten phone etiquette rules to fit.

Define "Phone Use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig past the article and you get a link to the published study. I had to dig but I found this:
"Phone use while driving is detected when the driver handles the phone for a certain period of time for various purposes such as talking, texting or navigating."
So talking hands free and using the GPS apparently count towards this total.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Aristos Mazer]

It doesn't make the research useless. You can find plenty of recent research that any conversation with someone not in the vehicle -- i.e., someone who doesn't know when to shut up when road conditions get interesting -- raises accident risk considerably, whether the phone is hands-free or not. I've seen stats indicating that having kids in a car where the only adult is the driver shows the same tendency, although not the same degree.

You can Google around for the research. Someone earlier on this slashdot thread found this paper, for example. The exact level of risk varies between studies, but all of them are considerable. That's why studies of cell phone use have begun including hands-free use.

Some use of the phone?

[BigBuckHunter]

When my phone rings and I'm driving, I'll look at the front of it, to see who is calling. If it's important, I'll park and call them back. If not, I'll wait till I get to my destination. On occasion (city driving), I'll take a moment to turn off the ringer so that I do not encounter subsequent distraction.

It's unfortunate that, even though I do not use a cell phone while driving, I'm still breaking the letter of the law.

Define phone use

[Anontroll]

If you dig deep enough you can get some of the methodology. They include talking hands free and using the GPS as phone use.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone.

Agreed. In fact I'm entering this message right now while driving. I do it all the time and nothing has ev

Speaking as a firefighter

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every car accident I've worked, but certainly in the past 3-5 years, most of them have been caused by cell phones. I've also seen three fatals caused by cell phones. Are there other distractions in the world? Sure. But none as ubiquitous as cell phones. I think many people look to their cell phones so often during the day, they no longer actively register doing so. You yell at your kids, you goof with your radio - you do that infrequently enough that you're actually cognizant of the change in your focus from driving to the other thing. Meanwhile we watch TV while on our phones, hold conversations with loved ones on our phones, walk down the street staring at our phones - we come to believe, because we didn't fall into an open manhole cover, that we're aware of our surroundings, that the cell phone is not consuming most if not all of our focus. We're wrong. And the woman who was rear-ending at a stoplight by a guy who was texting, pushed into opposing traffic, ejected through the driver side window, and then run over by her own car (100% true accident), pays the price.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Carewolf]

Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous. It doesn't matter if you are doing it handfree or holding the phone in your hand. Having a conversation with a remote person takes 80% of your concentrations and increases your chance of having an accident 100 times.

Confusing extrapolations and data

[Sumus Semper Una]

I wholeheartedly agree that using a cell phone while driving is distracting and dangerous. I've had too high a percentage of experiences being nearly hit by another driver only to later see at a stoplight that they've been using their cell phone to feel any other way about this. However, I do feel that the Zen Drive survey is making some strange extrapolations from their data. From the article:

Zendrive researchers also found that during an hour-long trip, drivers spent an average of 3.5-minutes using their phones. 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.

Ok, that's just ridiculous extrapolation there. The assumption that you had 105 2-second distractions is in no way supported by the survey. There could have been 42 5-second distractions mostly involving stoplights. There could have been 420 0.5-second distractions from glancing at the phone and reading it without interacting with it. Or any distribution in between. They could have just included a section on whether the drivers were ever interacting with their phones for more than 2 seconds and used that to determine a link between that number and the "more than 3 minutes" number. At least then they would have data to back up the claim.

Also, what is "phone use" in this context? If I'm using a hands-free device connected to my smartphone to have a conversation without interacting with the phone does the duration of that entire conversation count as "phone use?"

tl;dr - Disingenuous and ill-thought-through extrapolations designed to reinforce your point hurt your argument, even if I would otherwise agree with you.

Re:Confusing extrapolations and data

[amiga3D]

I'll admit I've used mine while driving in the past. One near miss cured me. Now I either ignore the thing or pull over.

The key is redirecting the behavior

[NotARealUser]

We keep trying to force people to do things they will not do. I am annoyed as the next person when some teenager sits at the traffic light texting their friend rather than going forward on green, but I think we go about the solution the wrong way. Fines certainly have their place, but when you see a trend develop that is not easy to correct, you need to think outside your paradigms and come up with more creative solutions.

An example of such creative thinking is how residential neighborhoods solved speeding issues. Many newer neighborhoods created road patterns that made it difficult to speed. Their first attempts punished everybody - they created speed bumps all over the road. Later attempts were more friendly to the law abiding drivers because they found that by putting in curves, the roads became visually appealing and it reduced speed.

Instead of thinking that fines and enforcement campaigns will solve this issue, we need to find better ways to adapt the technology and make it safer and less distracting. I don't have the ultimate solution on this, but handsfree devices in cars have helped greatly with voice calls. There is still a very big issue with text messages. That solution is still in the future. It is clear that people will not just give up text-message-like communication while driving, and it is also clear that there is no way to evenly enforce punishments on such a large percentage of people. Therefore, the best hope of a long term solutions lies in innovation and new ideas.

The key here is redirection. If a behavior cannot be solved by education and/or punishment, we must find ways to redirect the behavior into something safer.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[lactose99]

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous.

Citation?

Really? Found this in 3 seconds: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[maiden_taiwan]

People continue to use their cell phones while driving because of a limitation of our biology. Here's a quick demonstration.

Imagine right now that you're petting a dog. Can you see (in your mind's eye) the dog's face? Can you "feel" the fur against your fingers and the dog's breath against your face? Can you "hear" the dog panting in your head? Most people can, easily. Your brain is great at simulating these sensations through imagination.

Now, try to imagine agony. Imagine the physical feeling of crashing your car at high speed, because you were on your stupid cell phone. Can you actually experience the agony of your destroyed body in your mind? The answer (for almost everybody) is no. Your brain is very bad at imagining/simulating internal feeling. Our brains are wired that way. So we continue driving with cell phones, even though we know the risks.

These ideas were inspired by the book, "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," by Lisa Feldman Barrett, chapter 4, "The Origin of Feeling." https://www.amazon.com/How-Emo...

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[thegarbz]

You're over thinking it. People in general are poor at risk assessment. They get even poorer when you combine risk with something they do automatically without thinking (like driving). And as nice as the emotional example is, people are even poorer at judging risk when they have any emotional attachment to the activity at all.

Nothing more nothing less. You don't need to feel agony of an accident to know you don't want to be in one. But hey what are the odds, I mean I'm driving for 40min, and sending this message will only take me a few seconds so I should be fine ....

Re:They could have done better with the data

[nightfire-unique]

We found that driving performance of both younger and older adults was influenced by cell phone conversations. Compared with single-task (i.e., driving-only) conditions, when drivers used cell phones their reactions were 18% slower, their following distance was 12% greater, and they took 17% longer to recover the speed that was lost following braking. There was also a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions when drivers were conversing on a cell phone.

Hardly an increase of 10,000% as the OP suggests.

Driving while talking on a speakerphone/headset is worse than driving without talking to someone. Also, driving while tired is worse than driving while not tired, and oblivious drivers are worse than non-oblivious drivers. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Also unsurprising, misleading statistics

[s.petry]

TFA claims that 9 out of 10 people are using a cell phone while driving, but how many of those are using the two we would consider safe?

1. Phone calls: Voice assist means you don't need to take your eyes off the road to dial, and you surely don't to talk. I don't believe the hand waiving stereotypes fit for conversations while driving. At least as a generalization.

2. Maps: As with phone calls, once you plug in the directions there is no need to take your eyes off the road. "Turn left in one mile", "Turn left in 1/2 mile", etc...

There are other aspects of a phone which are certainly distractions and require screen time, but using the two apps mentioned is no more of a distraction than having a conversation with a passenger in the car. People can be morons with those uses, but lumping all users into the same "evil" basket is foolish.

Did we really need a survey ?

[nehumanuscrede]

For those who don't have their nose in their phone 24/7, a quick glance around you on the freeway will show you what we already know.

Many of the drivers buzzing along at 80+mph are only half paying attention to the road. The rest of their time is devoted to doing whatever on their smartphone.
This isn't limited to vehicular traffic, the same holds true for walkers, joggers and even folks on bicycles.

Personally, if someone drives off a cliff and removes themselves from the gene pool due to this sort of stupidity, I would have little issue with the matter.
However, the problem is these snowflakes are putting EVERYONE at risk with their behavior and it's painfully obvious that asking nicely and Public Service Announcements are doing little to curb it.

In the past, when I've tried to nicely point out to the driver who is weaving all over the roadway because they're playing with their phone instead of paying attention to the road, it's nearly started fights. They KNOW they're in the wrong, yet go full stupid when someone calls attention to it. Have actually had folks stop the car in the middle of the road and jump out wanting to fight. Or they go full road rage mode, hit the gas, jump in front of you and slam on the brakes.

All for trying to get them to simply put the phone down and drive the fucking car :|

Hell, we recently had an incident here where the driver of a large non-commercial truck was all over the place because they were playing on the damn phone. Others saw this, recorded it, called 911 to report it and nothing was done. The truck later veered into an oncoming lane and hit a bus head on. Killed quite a few folks if I recall.

The days of asking folks nicely are over.

Self-drive cars will be one option, but even at their current pace it will be a decade or more before they are ready for the average driver. Much longer before we see a majority of them on the roadways.

Near Field, RFID or a simple low power xmitter built into the car designed to set a bit in the phone when powered up could be used to disable all but emergency functions of a phone while in motion. This would greatly annoy passengers*, but since we're done asking nicely, it is what it is. Since the carrot isn't working, we have to resort to the stick instead.

*We managed it in the days before cell phones. You'll live. I promise.

We could severely increase the penalties if caught while driving distracted with one. Give it the same rules as a DUI / DWI since the outcome, more often than not, is the same. Crank the penalties up. $200 is laughable. $2000 per infraction stings a bit more. Confiscate the phone, the vehicle and revocation of the drivers license is much more eye-opening.

Sound harsh ?

Remember, this stupid behavior is putting everyone else at risk so I would rather see folks lose their possessions than someone else lose their life. If you're still willing to play with your phone while driving with these types of penalties in play, then you certainly don't deserve to have a license to drive to begin with.

So, this being Slashdot and all, I'm guaranteed to get flamed to death for even suggesting the above, but the fix for a problem doesn't begin until you can admit you have one to begin with. Everyone that is guilty of said behavior is in flat out denial that it's a problem at all.

That being said, ( again, since this is Slashdot ) what realistic technology options could be implemented today to solve the problem ?

Re:They could have done better with the data

[dfm3]

See, that just goes to show you how risky it is to use a phone while driving... AC managed to accidentally tap both the Preview AND submit buttons before they finished typing!