This past spring, a teenage driver lost control of her vehicle in Oro Valley and crashed into a tree.
Pictures from the scene show a banged-up Toyota straddling the curb near a palo verde, which is down a few sizable branches. The car’s left front wheel is nearly detached from the vehicle.
The driver, the only person involved in the crash, was taken to a hospital but was not seriously injured, the Oro Valley Police Department’s Lt. Chris Olson said.
Olson said the driver should consider herself lucky she wasn’t more seriously injured and that no one else was involved in the wreck. Officers determined she was distracted by a cellphone prior to the crash.
Olson said he got a call from the investigating officer asking if the driver could be cited under the town’s new hands-free ordinance, which prohibits the use of all hand-held electronic devices without the use of hands-free technology. The crash, however, occurred when the town had a grace period for the new law where officers issued warnings instead of citations.
Though Olson did not know exactly how it was determined in this case that the driver was indeed distracted, there are only a handful of ways available to officers to make that determination: A driver must admit to having been distracted, or the distraction and collision must be witnessed by the officer or member of the public, both of which are a fairly rare confluence of events.
“I need that person to tell me outright that they were using their phone,” said Sgt. Michael Dietsch, a traffic investigations supervisor with the Tucson Police Department. “You can guess how often that happens.”
So, given all that, Dietsch and Olson said the data their departments have gathered on distracted driving and area crashes are likely undercounting the phenomenon. Dietsch said it would be “impossible” to determine the scale of the discrepancy, but Olson ventured what he described as a “very conservative” guess that distracted driving likely plays a part in 20 percent of crashes.
Here are the actual figures:
In 2015, OVPD officers determined that 6 percent of crashes had distracted driving, which also includes distractions from passengers, food or electronics other than cellphones, as a factor. That figure rose to roughly 10 percent the following year.
TPD’s figures were significantly lower, but rose from 1 percent of crashes in 2014 to 2.3 percent in 2016. The officer who provided the data cautioned against reading too much into the rise, arguing that it could simply reflect the fact that officers are investigating possible distracted driving more thoroughly, given there is greater attention to the issue.
Additionally, many of the total reported crashes in TPD’s jurisdiction came from online reports that were never investigated by officers, and the online portal cannot collect distracted-driving statistics. In Oro Valley, on the other hand, there is no way to report crashes online, and the figures Olson provided were based only on crashes investigated by OVPD.
Olson said his department’s data is “as clean as it can be,” and added that the year-to-year increase seen in his numbers is a cause for concern and likely reflects an actual increase in distracted driving.
Pima County Sheriff’s Department and Marana Police Department officials told the Road Runner that they do not track that data.
Statewide data on distracted driving-related crashes, based on submissions from local jurisdictions like OVPD and TPD, also has a number of holes.
In 2015, the most recent year covered by the Arizona Department of Transportation’s annual “Crash Facts” report, about 3.4 percent of crashes were determined to involve some form of distraction and 1 percent involved distraction from electronic devices.
Nearly 60 percent involved no distraction and in just shy of 40 percent of all state collisions it was “unknown” if distraction played a role.
There are emerging technologies that allow police officers to determine if drivers were using their cellphones before collisions, but both Olson and Dietsch said such devices raise a number of constitutional concerns.
But how important is it to know exactly how often drivers involved in crashes were distracted by their phones or other devices?
Olson said the data, however flawed and incomplete as it may be, already show enough to demand action like the hands-free ordinances that recently went into effect in Oro Valley, Tucson and Pima County. Dietsch also applauded those ordinances.
“What’s probably more important is, are we doing anything about it each year?” Olson asked.
Dietsch, who pointed out that distracted driving dates back to the invention of the car, not the invention of the cellphone, encouraged motorists to just “concentrate on the task at hand, which is driving.”
