According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) records, the age group with the highest proportion of distracted drivers was the under-20 age group. Sixteen percent of all under-20 drivers involved in a fatal collision were reported to have been distracted while driving. Of these operators associated with lethal crashes who were reportedly distracted, the 30-39 year old group had the largest percentage of cellular phone involvement.  The need to trace mobile usage to reduce distracted driver crashes applies to both parents of adolescents, as well, companies.

On June 15, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) published a new document, Curbing Distracted Driving 2010 Survey of State Safety Programs, that provides the first comprehensive look at state activities and plans to cope with the escalating issue of distracted driving. The report details quite a few strategies states are implementing.  

Adults are just as likely as teens to have texted while driving and tend to be greatly more likely to have talked on the phone while driving.  Furthermore, 49% of adults say they’ve been passengers in a vehicle when the driver was sending or reading sms on their phone. Overall, 44% of adults suggest they have been passengers of drivers which used the cellular telephone in a fashion that placed themselves or others at an increased risk. Beyond driving, a number of cell-toting pedestrians get so diverted when chatting or texting they have physically bumped into another person or an object.  Using Cell Phone Spy to monitor cellphone usage may well apply to more than simply distracted drivers.

Driver distraction is a considerable and difficult safety issue to deal with.   The purpose of the current study, Driver distraction in commercial vehicle operations, was to address the gap in analysis by examining driver distraction in CMV operations. Naturalistic data collection is a technique used to review driver tendencies and efficiency by installing sensors and video cameras in fleet trucks and providing these vehicles to truck drivers to use as part of their usual revenue-producing deliveries. Using software to monitor Track Cell Phone Location may also have other advantages in discovering mobile phone misuse.  Taken together, these data sets represent 203 CMV drivers, seven trucking fleets, and 16 fleet locations. With regards to information, the data set used involves just about 3 million miles of constantly collected kinematic and video data, and signifies the most comprehensive naturalistic CMV driving set in the world.

Analysis of 1995-1999 Crashworthiness Data System (CDS) data, which includes law enforcement reports of tow-away crashes, attributes 1.5% of accidents to using/dialing a cell phone.  The Role of Driver Distraction in Traffic Crashes authors uncover no distinction in impairment due to hands-free in comparison to hand-held cellular phone use, and that the participants in the two cellphone circumstances were associated with more rear-end collisions and reacted 9% more slowly to vehicles ahead when they began to brake. The mean reaction time difference was 0.07 seconds.

The large scale epidemiological study, Wireless telephones and the risk of road crashes, confirms increased collision probability related to cell phone use, including a 10%-20% increase for injury accidents.

US Department Of Transportation Presents Analysis Regarding Distracted Driving is a post from: WiredWriter