It’s been illegal to hold a cellphone while driving in Arizona for a few years now. And a new report suggests that while fewer people are making calls while holding their phones behind the wheel, cellphone manipulation — things like texting, scrolling and swiping — hasn’t really changed that much.
Ian Reagan says that’s concerning, since those activities are more dangerous than making a call.
Reagan is a senior research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, where he studies driver behavior; he’s also a co-author on this report.
He joined The Show to talk more.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Ian, is this a matter of drivers continuing to do what they’ve done before, with the exception of making calls with handheld phones, probably in some cases because it’s so easy to make a call without actually handling your phone?
IAN REAGAN: Yes, I think that, partly, it might be an easy behavior to switch, just say, “I’m gonna make my phone calls through voice interfaces now.” Whereas there’s not the same alternative to if you’re gonna scroll through something. You don’t have a voice alternative.
And I think another thing that’s going on is just the functionality of smartphones, there’s this draw that a lot of people just feel this sense of urgency that pulls them to their phone, and the law isn’t enough.
BRODIE: Well, so what would be enough?
REAGAN: Well, from looking at research and other traffic safety areas, we know there is this approach to enforcement called high visibility enforcement. And the notion with high visibility enforcement is not to go out there and catch the individual driver and ticket them and stop the individual driver from doing the behavior.
The idea with high visibility enforcement is to say, hey, broadcast to the whole state: Police are out there enforcing this new distracted driving law.
And you put police out there you do pull people over if you see them engaged in cellphone use, you put signs out with the police that are on the roadside: distracted driving enforcement underway. And that’s how you have a general deterrent.
BRODIE: People have to think there’s a chance that they might get pulled over and ticketed for doing this.
REAGAN: Exactly.
BRODIE: How uniform are the laws in what they allow and don’t allow across the states?
REAGAN: It’s really a hodgepodge of laws. And you can see the evolution of laws sort of followed technology development. First we had cellphones, people were placing handheld calls. And then soon after that, SMS text messaging came up. And so in the early 2000s, states switched from or in addition to banning handheld calls, states started banning text messages.
And then it wasn’t until about 10 years ago, states started seeing that there are all these loopholes with trying to ban specific behaviors. And that’s when this new approach of banning the act of holding a phone started to become more common.
BRODIE: Did your study at all look at ages in terms of who’s doing this and who’s getting caught in terms of newer drivers or people who’ve been driving for a while?
REAGAN: So that’s an interesting question. We were able to use two different methodologies to measure this law’s effect. So one of the two methods, we did look at driver age. And as you would expect, we saw that younger drivers were much more likely to be using their phones than older drivers.
BRODIE: One of the things that was really interesting in Arizona when the cellphone ban bill was in front of the Legislature was people were making the argument, “OK, look, we get that you don’t want people on their phones while they’re driving, but what about people who are reading the newspaper or eating or putting on makeup or any number of other things that are taking their eyes off the road and their attention off of the task of driving?”
When you look at distracted driving, how big of a part of that are cellphones versus any other kind of distracting behavior?
REAGAN: That’s the $6 million question. Really, the federal numbers on this are poor. Officially for 2023, only 8% of all fatalities were attributed to distracted driving. And among those that 8%, only a small fraction — only about 10% of those crashes, distracted driving crashes — were associated with cellphones, according to the federal government. We believe that’s an underestimate, and most of the traffic safety community believes it’s an underestimate, too.
There are other reports, other research studies that put the, the percentage of crashes due to distraction much higher, closer to 25 or 30%. And so that’s one of the biggest challenges in studying distraction is that the actual true number of people killed on our roads each year due to distraction is poorly understood, even though we know it is a big problem.
BRODIE: I wonder if there’s also an education piece here. You talk about how a lot of younger drivers are continuing to use their phones, people who maybe are just getting their license or have only had it for a short time.
In addition to the enforcement piece, is there maybe an education piece or even something else that officials can do to try to bring these numbers down?
REAGAN : Well, education and information is essential. But I look at education as sort of a starting point, and you have to layer all of the redundant safety measures on top of education. It’s really a combination of education, good laws, enforcement and then realizing that even with everything that you can do to help drivers stay safe on the road, that we’re all human. We’re going to make mistakes.
And that’s why we’re also big advocates for crash avoidance technology. We’re seeing they do help drivers avoid crashes that we know are linked to distraction. So we’re sort of advocating for a whole systems-wide approach. Don’t focus on just one component. We need everything.
We need to make the roadways more difficult to speed on. If a road is more difficult to stay in the lane, you’re also going to be less likely to look at your phone. So it all sort of fits together.
BRODIE: That’s really interesting that sort of wider roads, wider lanes, maybe if they’re straight, It sounds like what you’re saying is the ease of driving and the sort of the lack of needing to be looking around or perceived need to be looking around all the time can lead to people thinking, “Oh, well, it’s OK if I check my texts really fast or if I fiddle with the next podcast on my phone or something,” as opposed to watching the road or watching the road in a place where the road is maybe a little more curvy or there are more stop signs or something like that.
REAGAN: Absolutely, absolutely. And there are other out-of-the box ways to approach this. You talked about education, and there are now technologies available where you can put cameras, the machines that are on the roadside and they will tell you what your speed is and tell you to slow down.
Well, you can put a camera in those systems now, a camera with AI, and it can tell whether drivers are using their phone. So you can display a message that says, “Hey distracted driver, put your phone down.” And that has been helpful. We’ve seen that those signs lower people’s speeds, so it’s likely that it’s effective at getting people to put their phones down, too.
-
A small commuter plane that took off from Deer Valley Airport crashed into a north Phoenix neighborhood Wednesday morning. -
The vandalized camera was one of 17 placed throughout Phoenix in late February, as part of a city safety campaign that aims to alter driver behavior and supplement police traffic enforcement. -
Work began on 350 acres owned by BNSF near Wittmann. BNSF said it is building a scaled-down facility to provide relief to their Glendale operation, which is at capacity. -
Cities and towns across Arizona would lose the ability to regulate some aspects of home design — both inside and out — under a bill scheduled to come up for debate in the state Senate on Monday. -
On average, Valley Metro light rail trains impact motor vehicles 20 times per year in Phoenix, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation. From 2015 to 2024, more than 200 of these collisions occurred in Phoenix — an average of one every 16 days.
