A teenager drives along a two-lane road, her eyes firmly cast downward at her phone. Six long seconds tick past. The road curves right but she drives straight—over the yellow line, into the oncoming lane and then onto the shoulder. She stops chomping her gum and looks up only when she’s about to plow into a road sign.
And this teenager, like the others in each of the 12-second videos, knew they were being watched. Their parents had agreed to place cameras in their cars as part of a driver-training program. The results of the new study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety were worse than expected: 58% of teen accidents were attributed to driving while distracted. That includes chatting with friends, cellphone use, singing and putting on makeup.
“Access to crash videos has allowed us to better understand the moments leading up to a vehicle impact in a way that was previously impossible,” says Peter Kissinger, President and CEO of the foundation. “The in-depth analysis provides indisputable evidence that teen drivers are distracted in a much greater percentage of crashes than we previously realized.”
AAA points out that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had previously estimated that distraction is a factor in only 14% of all teen-driver crashes.
Recognition errors (inattention and inadequate surveillance) and decision errors (failing to yield right of way, running stop signs and driving too fast) were the most common errors made by young drivers, according to the study, which detailed 1,691 moderate-to-severe non-fatal crashes. Researchers from the University of Iowa analyzed the videos. The drivers were all between the ages of 16 and 19 and from the Midwest.
By age 16, some teenagers have already been driving for two years. Six states allow kids to get their permits when they turn 14. Only nine states, mainly in the Northeast, make kids wait until they are 16 to get behind the wheel.
State legislatures are constantly updating their laws to crack down on cellphone use. Arizona and Montana are the only two states that haven’t banned texting and driving, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
The AAA Foundation study used in-vehicle event recorders from Lytx, a San Diego-based company. The DriveCam system collects video, audio and accelerometer data when a driver triggers the device by braking hard, driving too fast around corners or making an impact that exceeds a certain g-force.
Some key findings:
- Male drivers were involved in 52% of the crashes and females in 48%.
- More females than males were involved in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes (53% vs 46%).
- More males than females were involved in single-vehicle crashes (56% vs 44%).
- Drivers were not wearing their seatbelts in 7% of crashes.
- Passengers were present in the vehicle in 36% of crashes.
- Drivers were much more likely to use their phones if they were alone in the car.
- The driver was found to have been driving too fast for conditions in 79% of single-vehicle crashes.
“Conventional wisdom holds that Driver’s Education produces safer drivers, but little research supports this,” the AAA foundation said in a report last year. It is “unclear whether this is because it doesn’t ‘work,’ or because the evaluations themselves are flawed.”
Insurance companies such as Liberty Mutual offer a discount on automobile policies when parents pay to have their children take an online course. The company says that teens who complete its teenSMART program have up to 30% fewer collisions one year after training than teens in matched control groups that didn’t take the training.
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