Citation

Arnold LS, Horrey WJ. AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Washington, D.C.: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2022.

Copyright

(Copyright 2022, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety)

The full document is available online.

Abstract

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 3,142 people were killed in 2019 in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in which one or more drivers was reported as distracted (National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2021). On a recent nationally-representative survey, 37% of respondents reported talking on a handheld cellphone while driving in the past 30 days, while 34% reported reading texts or emails and 23% reported typing texts or emails while driving (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2021). While it is generally acknowledged that distracted driving is underreported in crash data, it is well established that distracted driving interferes with safe driving and increases crash risk, though estimates of risk vary by specific behavior and context. Given the limited resources available for improving traffic safety, it is important to understand the effectiveness of various countermeasures against distracted driving that may be considered for implementation.

In 2019, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety conducted a review of the then-current scientific literature concerning the effectiveness of existing and emerging countermeasures against distracted driving (Arnold et al., 2019). In general, this review found that some studies have shown promising results; however, across the different types of countermeasures, there are many instances of nuanced or mixed outcomes, questionable generalizability to other populations or regions and, in other cases, insufficient evidence to draw firm conclusions. The 2019 review focused only on those studies that included safety or behavioral measures, such as the occurrence of crashes, observed or self-reported behaviors, or objective measures of driving performance.

Based on this review and an expert workshop that was convened in September 2019, there was a need
to continue to examine distraction countermeasures, adopting more inclusive criterion and going beyond the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The specific objectives of this follow-up work are as follows:

■ To review and update the relevant scientific literature published since the 2019 review with new studies looking at the efficacy of existing and/or novel countermeasures on safety-based measures.
■ To consider the current state of knowledge regarding studies that have included non-safety based measures in evaluating the efficacy of countermeasures.
■ To document and characterize available smart- phone based apps, products, or services aimed at mitigating driver distraction.