New research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety argues that we are drastically undercounting the number of accidents that stem from distracted driving and smartphone use, based on anonymized cellphone data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics — which had data on cellphone activity before and after collisions. According to that data, drivers on the platform were using their cellphones in the 30 seconds prior to impact in seven percent of single-vehicle crashes and eight percent of two-vehicle crashes. Police reports for those same crashes only recorded cellphone use in under one percent of the crashes, indicating that analyses of distracted driving based on police reports could be seriously undercounting the true frequency of phone use.
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