New York Personal Injury Law Blog

Drivers in New York may be worried about the impact of distracted driving on road safety. Despite warnings, public awareness campaigns and new laws, people continue to text, surf and chat on their smartphones while behind the wheel of their cars. Even public officials have been seen live streaming on Facebook while driving. However, the families of people who have been killed in crashes due to distracted driving are demanding tougher penalties and harsher enforcement for operating a vehicle while distracted.

Traffic fatalities have gone up around the United States in recent years, and many attribute at least part of that spike to the emergence of the smartphone. Many drivers struggle not to look at their phones, send texts or check social media while sitting in slow traffic or at a red light. Many states, like New York, have passed laws that prohibit the use of handheld devices while driving; any interaction with electronics must be hands-free. Similar laws have been passed in Rhode Island and Oregon. One company that monitors phone use claims that distracted driving dropped by 19 percent in the first month after the laws were adopted.

Car safety tech can cut down on crashes by 40 percent and crash-related fatalities by 30 percent, according to federal estimates. Yet it can backfire on drivers who do not understand its limitations. This overreliance on safety tech, which can be seen in many drivers across New York, is the subject of a AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety report. The results raise questions about how drivers will adapt to a future of semiautonomous vehicles.

For example, among people who have blind-spot monitoring systems in their vehicles, 80 percent overestimated its ability to detect fast-approaching vehicles, bicyclists and pedestrians. Twenty percent put so much trust in the feature that they never check for oncoming vehicles when changing lanes.

New York drivers may be intrigued by the results of a study conducted by Volvo and the Harris Poll about distracted driving, how many people engage in it and how they perceive it. It is broken up into two studies involving 2,000 participants in the U.S. More than 50 percent, regardless of age, felt that they need to refocus because they find they are more distracted than they were five years ago.

Most of the participants asserted that distracted drivers, not intoxicated drivers or speeding or aggressive drivers, posed the greatest threat on the road. Approximately 90 percent agreed that there are more distractions today than there were five years ago with 43 percent citing cellphones as the biggest distraction, followed by 11 percent saying children and 9 percent saying other passengers.

In New York and around the country, all teenagers must drive under adult supervision before going for their license. One might think that teen drivers pose a greater threat to others on the road before, not after, they obtain their license. A study from the National Institutes for Health and Virginia Tech University, however, came to the opposite conclusion.

The study involved 90 teen and 131 parent participants in Virginia. Researchers analyzed driving behaviors from the time when they obtained their learner's permit to the time when they had been driving for one year as licensed drivers. They found that teens are eight times more likely to get in a crash or near-miss in the three months after obtaining their license than in the three months before.