Survey shows a scary number of people check email, use Facebook and even take selfies while driving
A survey commissioned by AT&T reveals that smartphone owners are doing a lot more things on their devices they’re not supposed to do than just texting while driving.
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The telephone survey was conducted by Braund Research on 2,067 individuals who drive at least once a day and who own a smartphone, The New York Times reports.
Texting still remains a high priority for drivers, with 61% admitting to texting while driving. 33% of respondents said they email while driving and 28% surf the Internet. More than 10% use Instagram and Snapchat.
As many as 27% of drivers age 16 to 65 say they’re using Facebook while driving, while 14% use Twitter. Disturbingly, 30% of those who said they post on Twitter while behind the wheel said they do it “all the time.”
But there’s even worse than that. 17% of the people interviewed said they take selfies while driving.
“One in 10 say they do video chat while driving. I don’t even have words for that,” AT&T’s senior executive vice president for global marketing Lori Lee told the publication. 27% of them thought they can do it safely while driving, the survey showed.
The irony here is that AT&T also happens to sell plenty of iPhones and Android smartphones which might be used in such activities by drivers, in spite of the company’s efforts to raise awareness about the dangers related to distracted driving.
The Times also says that an annual survey from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 36.1% of drivers read a text or email while driving last year, with 27.1% having typed one. The numbers are slightly up from 2012, when 34.7% of drivers said they read texts and 26.2 typed admitted to typing on the phone while driving.
Meanwhile, car crashes resulting from texting while driving rose to 6% of all crashes, up from 5% last year, but the numbers might not be relevant as not all drivers would admit their smartphones are to blame for crashes.
Phones are addictive, the survey also showed, with 22% of respondents saying they had to access online media while driving because they felt addicted. Recent studies on the matter showed that smartphone use can indeed have side-effects, such as addiction and distraction from other activities.
Maybe those self-driving cars are a good idea after all.
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