52 Percent of Drivers Feel Less Safe than One Year Ago...Driver Distractions

The leading reason cited by American

drivers was distracted driving, with

88 percent of motorists rating drivers

who text and email as a very serious

threat to their safety.



Edmunds Auto Observer

By Auto Observer Staff
September 19, 2011

More than half of drivers said driving feels less safe now than it did five years ago, according to a survey for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: 2010 Traffic Safety Culture Index. The 52 percent of drivers who said driving feels less safe was an increase of 17 percent over the number of drivers who said so just a year earlier. The reason: concerns about increasing driver distractions, according to Jim Foley, a researcher at Toyota Motor Corp.’s Technical Center in Ann Arbor, MI.

Foley said analysis of driver distraction is a chief priority for Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center, which just announced it will spend $50 million for new safety research projects. One aspect of the research will expand study of the so-called “human-machine interface,” or HMI, and how designs for interacting with onboard systems can affect distraction. Early conclusions from CRSC studies, Foley said, indicate that talking and listening to engage various functions is markedly less distracting than controls that require visual attention. One related study indicated that 78 percent of crashes were related to inattention from the driver.

The study showed that the majority of drivers (62 percent) feel that talking on a cell phone is a very serious threat to safety, but they do not always behave accordingly or believe that others share these views. In fact, nearly 70 percent of those surveyed admitted to talking on their phones and 24 percent said they read or sent text messages or emails while driving in the previous month.

When You Confuse the Two...