Research
The Department of Transportation offers this limited bibliography while our searchable Distracted Driving database is under construction. This list of resources was compiled by the National Transportation Library, USDOT and is meant to be a brief introduction to the current state of research on the topic of distracted driving, as well as highlighting some resources from the last 10 years. The Department does not endorse the research listed in this bibliography, nor does any of the research represent the official policy or position of the Department of Transportation, its agencies or its employees.
Adults are just as likely as teens to have texted while driving and are substantially more likely to have talked on the phone while driving.
In addition, 49% of adults say they have been passengers in a car when the driver was sending or reading text messages on their cell phone. Overall, 44% of adults say they have been passengers of drivers who used the cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger. Beyond driving, some cell-toting pedestrians get so distracted while talking or texting that they have physically bumped into another person or an object.
Adults and Cell Phone Distractions
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s mission is to “save lives, prevent injuries, and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes.” Driver distraction is a significant and difficult safety problem to address. This program lays out NHTSA’s efforts to address it. Planned projects for 2010 and beyond are described, with some building on a significant number of research projects conducted in prior years.
Overview of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Driver Distraction Program
The purpose of the current study was to address the gap in research by investigating driver distraction in CMV operations. Naturalistic data collection is a method used to study driver behavior and performance by installing sensors and video cameras in fleet trucks and providing these vehicles to truck drivers to use as part of their normal revenue-producing deliveries. Taken together, these data sets represent 203 CMV drivers, seven trucking fleets, and 16 fleet locations. In terms of data, the data set used includes approximately 3 million miles of continuously collected kinematic and video data, and represents the most comprehensive naturalistic CMV driving set in the world.
Driver distraction in commercial vehicle operations.
This experiment finds that conversing on a hands-free cell phone with a stream of traffic passing in the left lane leads participants to take longer to respond when the car ahead brakes and to a longer time before they reach their slowest speed. When conversing with a remote party, participants failed to later recognize billboards that they had look at directly.
Cell phone-induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving.
This analysis of 1995-1999 Crashworthiness Data System (CDS) data, consisting of police reports of tow-away crashes, attributes 1.5% of crashes to using/dialing a cell phone.
The Role of Driver Distraction in Traffic Crashes.
The authors find no difference in impairment due to hands-free compared to hand-held cell phone use, and that the participants in the two cell phone conditions were involved in more rear-end collisions and reacted 9% more slowly to vehicles ahead when they began to brake. The mean response time difference was 0.07 seconds.
A comparison of the cell-phone driver and the drunk driver.
Younger and older drivers conversing on a hands-free cell phone were found to have slower responses to random braking by the vehicle ahead. The younger drivers responded 0.13 seconds more slowly, and the older drivers responded 0.17 seconds more slowly when conversing on a cell phone. Overall, use of cell phone resulted in 18% slower responses to the vehicle ahead braking.
Profiles in Driver Distraction: Effects of Cell Phone Conversations on Younger and Older Drivers.
This research synthesis finds across 28 studies that hands-free and handheld cell phone use both result in slower response times than without use of these devices. The average difference was 0.13 seconds. The study also evaluated 19 studies on lane-keeping, but found no effect.
Examining the Impact of Cell Phone Conversations on Driving Using Meta-Analytic Techniques.
This large scale epidemiological study finds increased crash risk associated with cell phone use, including a 10%-20% increase for injury accidents.
Wireless telephones and the risk of road crashes.
Simulated driving while talking on a hands-free cell phone results in more traffic violations and lapses of attention such as slow starts at a traffic signal. In this study drivers responded more quickly to unexpected events in the forward view while conversing due to narrowing of attention.
Engrossed in conversation: The impact of cell phones on simulated driving performance.
The study finds that conversations with passengers result in better lane keeping control than cell phone conversations because passengers share attention to the road with drivers.
Passenger and cell phone conversations in simulated driving.
The study finds texting produces a four-fold increase in time that drivers' eyes are off of the road, a decrease in lane keeping performance, and reduced ability to detect and respond to traffic signs indicating a required lane change.
The effects of text messaging on young novice driver performance.
Distraction from the primary task of driving could present a serious and potentially deadly danger. In 2008, 5,870 people lost their lives and an estimated 515,000 people were injured in police-reported crashes in which at least one form of driver distraction was reported on the crash report.
Distracted Driving Fatality Report
The percentage of drivers visibly manipulating hand-held devices has reached 1 percent while hand-held cell phone use by drivers stood at 6 percent in 2008. The 2008 hand-held cell phone use rate translates into 812,000 vehicles being driven by someone using a hand-held cell phone at any given daylight moment.
Electronic Device Use by Drivers
Distracted driving is dangerous. Distraction from cell phone use while driving (hand held or hands free) delays a driver's reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent.
Fatal Distraction? A comparison of the cell-phone driver and the drunk driver
Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.
A decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak
80 percent of the crashes in the study are related to driver inattention. There are certain activities that may be more dangerous than talking on a cell phone. However, cell phone use occurs more frequently and for longer durations than other, riskier behaviors. Thus, the #1 source of driver inattention is cell phones.
100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study
Drivers that use handheld devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Status Report: Teens Talk
One in four (26%) of American teens of driving age say they have texted while driving, and half (48%) of all teens ages 12 to 17 say they’ve been a passenger while a driver has texted behind the wheel.
Teens and Distracted Driving
