A whopping 52 percent of all car crashes are caused by distracted driving, mostly due to people scrolling through texts, checking social media or sending emails, according to a new study from Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), a technology and analytics company aimed at improving driver safety.
The company looked at data from hundreds of thousands of drivers gathered through CMT’s DriveWell app. The findings put the costs of distracted driving in stark perspective at a time when road fatalities are on the rise: The National Safety Council, as the study press release explains, reports that U.S. driving fatalities have increased 14 percent since 2015 and that 11 teens die as a result of texting and driving each day.
It doesn’t take long for a text or a social media scroll to lead to devastating consequences. The study found that the average length of distraction leading up to a crash was a mere 135 seconds.
April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, making it an important time to address what CMT’s chief technology officer Hari Balakrishnan described as “one of the most urgent public safety problems facing our communities today.”
Ultimately, this is one more extremely convincing reason to unplug — especially when it puts our lives, and the lives of others, on the line. Don’t let your phone turn you into a statistic.
Read more about the study here.
Originally published at journal.thriveglobal.com