Conversations, eating, drinking, texting, checking emails and social media notifications, using navigation and music apps, even putting on lipstick all contribute to distracted driving. Distracted driving means anything that takes your attention away from the road, whether it’s that Starbucks frappuccino you’re trying to sip, or arguing with your best friend about your Spotify play list. “I think we can make a big difference if we can solve for it the right way.”įor starters, Delgado says, “texting while driving” is an antiquated term for talking about the problem. “What my research group is trying to focus on is how can we design around the imperfection of human decision-making,” Delgado says.
#Why not to text and drive 10 reasons drivers
They hope their work leads to the development of more smartphone programs that can nudge drivers into the correct behavior, like apps that automatically switch on to prevent incoming notifications while in the car. The research team includes experts from the fields of medicine, behavioral economics, psychology, insurance and technology. He’s heading up a multimillion-dollar grant, one of the largest ever funded by the federal government, to figure out the best ways to use technology to help drivers put down their phones. Years of treating people who have been hurt in distracted driving crashes is a big reason why Delgado is researching this topic. The Imperfection of Human Decision-making Even though if you were to step out of the situation, you would say you shouldn’t be doing this.” “But the decision to reach for that phone can be impulsive, it can be emotional, it can be subconscious and automatic. “You talk to any teenager in the country, and they’ve been beaten over the head that texting while driving is dangerous,” Delgado says. He picked it up, dropped it on the floorboard, reached down to get it and crashed into the guardrail. He sees it all the time in patients who come into his ER, like the college student who was heading down the highway to pick up his girlfriend when he heard his phone ding. Kit Delgado, an emergency room physician who’s also an assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, gets that it’s hard to keep your hands off your phone. While the percentage seems small, that’s nearly 300 deaths that could have been prevented. Teens were responsible for 9% of all the fatal crashes involving distracted drivers in 2017, according to government figures. Your parents have lectured you endlessly about it, you’ve been taught the horror stories about it in driver’s ed class, and you probably live in one of the 49 states where it’s illegal for teens to text behind the wheel.īut the numbers suggest you’re not always getting the message. You already know that you’re not supposed to text and drive.