A study published in Deviant Behavior in June 2018 suggests that concern about the risks from texting and driving may be in large part a moral panic.
The researchers examine 11 years of car crash data from Kentucky and found that less than 1 percent of automobile accidents were attributable to the use of cell phones. Moreover as the ownership level of cell phones increased, the rate of accidents where cell phone use was a contributing factor remained relatively constant.
The researchers did find that younger drivers were more likely to be at fault in accidents where cellphone use was a contributing factor, however, they accounted for a tiny percentage of the car accidents in Kentucky during that period.
Much attention has been given to the level of distraction cellphones pose to younger drivers (those under age 20), and in fact, we found these drivers are disproportionately distracted, representing only 3% of drivers but 18% of at fault drivers in cellphone-related crashes. However, the number of crashes involving young people remained an incredibly small portion of the overall problem. Specifically, cellphone-distracted drivers under 20 accounted for 0.12% of the 1,674,236 crashes in Kentucky from 2005 to 2015. Despite the attention of cellphone distraction among young drivers, the number of fatalities nationally declined by 53% between 2004 and 2013.
Over the 11 years of data, at fault drivers under the age of 20 were involved in just 17 fatal collisions where cell phone distraction was listed as a contributing human factor. These drivers were also only involved in 491 cell phone-related crashes resulting in injuring someone. This means one in every 805 collisions between 2005 and 2015 involved a cellphone distracted youth. One in every 98,485 collisions resulted in a fatality caused by a teenager texting and driving. These numbers are hardly representative of an epidemic.
Hence, the suggestion that laws and campaigns about using a cell phone while driving are driven by a moral panic rather than solid evidence of a widespread problem,
In the end, texting and driving is a terrible idea. However, the level of hype and misleading information surrounding the issue obfuscates the fact that cell phone-related collisions are far more
rare than other forms of distraction. The unjustified panic created about this issue fails to recognize the stability of the year-to-year collision figures and the year-to-year increase in cell phone technological development and adoption by the public.. . .
Driving is an essential task, and the risks posed by traffic crashes make clear the moral responsibility for drivers to operate their vehicles safely. Any distraction from the task of driving is dangerous, but the evidence demonstrates cellphones are not posing the threat many people would believe. Although many government and other authoritative sources mask the real statistic under the broader definition of distracted driving, the evidence presented here is unambiguous: cellphones are a contributing factor in less than 1% of crashes. At least in Kentucky, this number has remained stable, despite theoretical reasons why it should have increased. This fact is something to be explored in future research. However, the focus of this study has been the level of disproportionality between social fears of texting and driving and the objective threat posed by cellphone-distracted drivers.