If you’ve been seeing lots of motorists in San Jose using their telephones at the same time as driving, your eyes have now not been deceiving you. And the hassle’s getting worse.
That’s according to a new study of distracted using that consists of statistics from an expansion of predominant U.S. Towns.
Researchers located motorists in San Jose had been the use of their phones for about eight.2 percent of their driving time in 2019, up from 7 percentage remaining 12 months.
The examine through San Francisco-based totally street-safety statistics-analytics firm Zendrive also checked out San Francisco and Oakland, and blended their consequences, displaying the cities collectively aren’t some distance behind San Jose in the number of time drivers spent distracted by using their phones: 7.Eight percentage of using the time this yr. It becomes 6.6 percent in 2018.
These three local cities fell across the middle of the p.C. A number of the 19 U.S. Cities Zendrive researchers studied. Houston and Dallas took the top spots for most-distracted drivers, with motorists spending extra than nine percent of riding time the use of handsets. The probabilities in Seattle and Portland were the bottom, at just above 7 percent.
California drivers in standard spent the 14th-lowest quantity of time on phones, with Pennsylvanians spending the least time and Virginians the maximum, in step with the take a look at. California bans hand-held phone use at the same time as riding. Virginia has a partial ban that prohibits texting even as driving but allows speaking with a telephone held to the ear. Pennsylvania bans the handiest texting and wearing earphones at the same time as using.
From the last yr to this 12 months, “distracted riding improved in every single nation,” Zendrive mentioned. “The distracted riding epidemic, aka ‘this generation’s under the influence of alcohol riding,’ is growing together with the costs of collisions and pedestrian deaths. This coincides with the upward thrust of ‘Phone Addicts’ — a new class of drivers so obsessed on their phones, they don’t work or care that they’re using distracted.”
For the distracted-riding study, launched this month, the researchers used phone sensors to gather facts at the motive force conduct of 1.8 million motorists on more than four.5 billion street miles from November 2018 through January, Zendrive said.