Smartphone use is leading to more highway deaths. 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 - one of 37,262 that year. Three months later, Smith quit her job in real estate 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 smart-phone 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.
The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we're pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.
Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motor-cyclists, 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.
We also see an increase of the number of deaths attributed to Hispanic drivers and a large increase of the Hispanic driver population. The reckless Hispanic drivers appears to be the cause of the large increase of the deaths and accidents and crashes, as they are known speedsters. The Hispanics and blacks commit disproportionately higher accidents than their percentage of the population.
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Smartphone Apps May Be Cause of Spike in Traffic Deaths
by Althea Chang Nov 16, 2016, 8:02 AM
Contrary to what you might think, texting may not be the most deadly distraction for drivers -- or at least not the most widespread one. Smartphone apps now let you dictate messages, ask for directions and even hear the texts you receive, sometimes even without you taking your hands off the wheel. Yet the resulting distraction could be behind an alarming spike in traffic deaths.
Credit: FacebookFollowing a dramatic decline over the past 35 years, the number of traffic deaths in the first half of this year in the United States jumped by more than 10 percent, to 17,775, from the same time period a year earlier, according to The New York Times.
"This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now," Mark R. Rosekind, director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told The Times.
Snapchat was under fire recently for encouraging drivers to post photos showing how fast they're driving, when last month, a distracted teenaged Snapchat user in Tampa killed five people. Pokemon Go players have been distracted by searching for characters on the road while driving. The Waze mapping app rewards drivers with points for reporting traffic conditions, The Times noted.
Most of those apps require the user to touch the phone's screen. As any good driver knows, taking your eyes off the road for even a second can be dangerous. That's why Google's Android Auto, Apple's CarPlay, Ford's Sync and a ton of other systems can keep you from looking down at your phone when you're driving. Facebook has announced that its Messenger app can be integrated into Android Auto as long as you have the messenger app installed on your smartphone.
But even that doesn't always solve the issue. Even when your hands are on the wheel, your mind may be elsewhere if you're talking on the phone, listening to a text message or email being read aloud or interacting with an app via voice commands.
"It's the cognitive workload on your brain that's the problem," Deborah Hersman, former chairwoman of the U.S. government's National Transportation Safety Board, told The Times.
The solution may be to not let any new apps or car-tech systems lull you into a false sense of security. Even if your car has a system that lets you access all your apps without looking, it can wait, as famed director Werner Herzog says in a heartbreaking short documentary about the dangers of texting and driving.