White Paper: Distracted driving: Understanding the issue, finding the best solutions
What is distracted driving?
“Distracted driving” is any visual, manual or cognitive distraction while a person is behind the wheel of a vehicle. Such activities have the potential to distract the person from the primary task of driving and increase the risk of crashing.
What is distracted driving?
“Distracted driving” is any visual, manual or cognitive distraction while a person is behind the wheel of a vehicle. Such activities have the potential to distract the person from the primary task of driving and increase the risk of crashing.
Some of the most common distractions are talking on a mobile phone or texting while driving, adjusting the radio or temperature controls, eating or drinking, picking up objects, using an electronic device such as a GPS, applying makeup or being preoccupied with passengers.
Clearly, there are unlimited ways that a person’s mind can be on something other than the road when driving.
However, for the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on one element of distracted driving that garners the most attention and has lawmakers working overtime to control: use of smartphones while driving.
Why should it concern you?
Too many drivers are doing it – and it has an effect. Distracted driving has become a concern of significant proportion to traffic safety organizations, police, insurance companies, fleet organizations and responsible drivers everywhere. According to a study conducted by AllState Canada, 80% of collisions are caused by distracted driving.1 Other studies have shown that 47% of adults admit to texting, emailing or browsing on a cell phone while driving2 – and 50% of employees admit to doing the same thing.3
Data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in December 2011 showed an estimated 3,092 fatalities in distraction-affected crashes in 2010. NHTSA’s National Attitudes Survey on Distracted Driving found that more than three-quarters of drivers reported they are willing to answer calls and 41% would place a call while driving. Ten percent would read an incoming text, while 6% would send a text while driving. The survey respondents noted that they rarely consider traffic situations when deciding when to use their phones.4
Distracted driving affects reaction time. Researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute recorded how long it took 42 drivers on an 11-mile test track to stop once they saw a flashing yellow light. For drivers who were not distracted by texting, the average stopping time was 1-2 seconds. For drivers who were texting while driving, the reaction time was 3-4 seconds – double the time, a potentially fatal difference. In fact, drivers were more than 11 times more likely to miss the flashing light altogether when they were texting.5
All the wrong numbers go up. This kind of behavior makes a driver 23% more likely to crash, increasing claims, plaintiff litigation, workers comp and insurance premiums. According to a study conducted by AAA, the average cost of an injury-only crash is $126,000, while the cost of a traffic fatality is over $6 million.6
Your company is at risk. When an employee is involved in a crash because of distracted driving, the victims have the law on their side when it comes to getting recompensed. Two long-established legal theories – respondeat superior and negligent entrustment – hold that a company is responsible for how its employees behave while on the job, and how they behave while using company-owned equipment, including fleet vehicles.
For example, last year, a 19-year-old student was killed when her car was hit by a cargo van driven by an employee of a toy company, who was texting at the time of the crash. Her family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the driver, as well as against the toy company, alleging it was negligent when it entrusted the driver with the vehicle and did not recognize his “reckless and dangerous propensity” to text while driving.
What’s the government doing about it?
On January 3, 2012, a new ruling by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) went into effect, prohibiting interstate commercial drivers from using hand-held mobile phones. This includes reaching for, holding or dialing a mobile phone. There is no exception for when they are stopped in traffic or at signals. Individual drivers caught violating the ban will face fines of up to $2,750 and could lose their commercial driver’s licenses if they are cited for multiple infractions. Employers whose drivers are caught will also face civil penalties of up to $11,000 if employees are engaged in company business at the time of the violation. Commercial drivers are still permitted to engage in hands-free mobile phone use.
In December 2011, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a proposal to the 50 states and Washington, D.C., to ban driver use of all portable electronic devices, including hands-free devices. This generated headline news in major media outlets because it’s the first time in the history of this debate that a Federal authority has suggested a total ban on cell phone use while driving. (Note that the NTSB does not make laws – it simply investigates crashes and makes recommendations – but it’s clear that the trend toward controlling driver behavior in this area is increasing.)
All of the Canadian provinces have enacted legislation to ban the use of hand-held electronic devices while driving. Newfoundland was the first province to adopt a distracted driving law (2002), and Alberta was the last (2011).
The Canadian Automotibe Association is convinced that driving while using a hands-free cell phone is no safer than driving with a hand-held cell phone, and is currently pushing provincial governments to expand their bans.
What can your company do about it?
One crucial step in protecting your fleet drivers – and your company – is to develop and implement a cell phone policy, using the following guidelines:
- Know your risk. Understand how many crashes your company has had in the past, the number of insurance claims and your premium history. Find your organizational balance of revenue and risk management.
- Review relevant regulations, such as those from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, FMCSA and your state and local regulations. PHH Arval © 2012 3 Distracted driving: Understanding the issues, finding the best solutions
- Don’t make a policy in a vacuum. You need to talk to the people who will be following the policy.
- Communicate from the top down. Executive sponsorship is required for a cell phone policy to be successful.
- Reward and recognize. Once a policy is in place, ensure that safe drivers are rewarded for their behavior.
- Enforce it. If you don’t plan on enforcing it, don’t create a policy at all.
Another important step in protecting your fleet includes training. According to experts at Center for Transportation Safety, a PHH Arval company, effective training involves use of multiple methods: classroom and online instruction, work in simulators and behind the wheel. Training should focus on a driver’s behavioral attitudes, including understanding the dangers inherent in distracted driving.
Understanding life’s realities
The unfortunate truth is: laws and cell phone policies may bring much-needed attention to the issue of driving while using mobile electronic devices – but they have historically not been able to eliminate their use.
According to a 2010 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Highway Loss Data Institute7:
[T]exting bans aren’t reducing crashes. Survey results indicate that many drivers, especially younger ones, shrug off these bans. Among 18-24 year-olds, the group most likely to text, 45 percent reported doing so anyway in states that bar all drivers from texting. This is just shy of the 48 percent of drivers who reported texting in states without bans. Many respondents who knew it was illegal to text said they didn't think police were strongly enforcing the bans.
"But this doesn't explain why crashes increased after texting bans," Adrian Lund [president of both HLDI and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety] points out. "If drivers were disregarding the bans, then the crash patterns should have remained steady. So clearly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers' eyes further from the road and for a longer time."
Other studies have also shown that driver attitudes toward cell phone use are difficult to change. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s annual Traffic Safety Culture Index8 shows that 95% of drivers say that texting/emailing by other drivers is “a serious threat to their personal safety” – yet more than one-third (35%) of those drivers also confess to having texted/emailed while driving within the past month. AllState Canada9 found that while a vast majority of people thinks driving while being distracted is unacceptable, nearly three Canadian drivers out of four admit to driving distracted.
How can technology help?
The issue, then, isn’t with developing the right laws and policies – it’s with enforcing them. That’s where technology can make a difference.
To offer a solution for fleets, PHH Arval partnered with the technology experts at ZoomSafer to address distracting driving and reduce liability exposure. We created iNmotionSM, which utilizes active controls to enforce safe and legal cell phone use while driving.
Once it’s installed on a driver’s Blackberry® or AndroidTM smartphone, iNmotion will detect when an employee is driving and automatically restrict the use of a cell phone and send automated responses via text message or email. You can create your own customized features based on your cell phone policy.
iNmotion also integrates information regarding cell phone use while driving with other safety-related information associated with that driver – enhancing your ability to identify risky drivers and institute counter-measures.
For more information about distracted driving and technology / training solutions, contact your PHH Account Representative or call (800) ONLY-PHH.
1 CTV, October 4, 2010; CBC News, October 5, 2010
2 Pew Internet & American Life Project
3 Career Builder November 2009 Survey
4 NHTSA report on “distraction-affected” fatalities, December 8, 2011
5 Texas Transportation Institute Study, October 5, 2011.
6 AAA Study (2009)
7 Highway Loss Data Institute, “Texting bans don't reduce crashes; effects are slight crash increases,” September 28, 2010.
8 AAA Foundation Traffic Safety Culture Index, June 2011
9 AllState Canada survey conducted by Leger Marketing, July 2010
