If you ask someone about distracted driving, they will probably tell you that they know how dangerous it is. They may cite smartphone use as the most dangerous type of distraction, since it causes you to look down, away from the road and to take your hands off the wheel.
You may expect that, knowing all of that, people would never do it. That’s where you would be wrong.
According to a new study from Zendrive, a driving analytics company, people use their phones most of the time when they are in the car. It’s not a slight majority, either.
Their study claims that people pull out their phones and actively use them on 88 percent of their drives. That means that only a mere 12 percent of trips do not involve people looking at their phones.
The study was comprehensive. It looked at about 5.6 billion miles traveled. It included over 3 million people. It is not as if a small sample size of high-risk drivers skewed the results. This is how most people drive all of the time.
How long does a phone cause these millions of drivers to be distracted? In just a 60-minute trip, the study claims that drivers spend an average of 3.5 minutes using their devices.
It’s bad. Reports indicate that a distraction that lasts for a mere two seconds ups the odds of an accident by a staggering 20 percent. Now consider how bad the odds look when the distraction lasts for 10 seconds.
Have you been hit by a distracted driver? If so, make sure you know all of the legal options that you have to seek financial compensation for lost wages, medical bills and the like.
Source: Wired, “Turns Out, a Horrifying Number of People Use Their Phones While Driving,” Aarian Marshall, accessed April 06, 2018
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