New statistics from the DfT reveal that there could be more than 50,000 instances of people driving while using a hand-held phone daily.

Utilising new technology, the figures also show that half a million motorists drive while not wearing a seatbelt.

The survey data was collected using Acusensus ‘Heads Up’ technology, using roadside cameras to capture clear images through windscreens.

Phoning ahead

The headline figures collated by the DfT in a project with AECOM suggest that three in every thousand drivers observed on England’s roads are using a mobile phone while driving.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, van drivers are breaking the law three times the rate of car drivers when it comes to using a handheld phone while driving.

Furthermore, the highest proportion of drivers observed using a mobile phone in England were those estimated to be aged 17 to 29.

The rates dropped significantly with age, though male drivers were also more likely to offend.

 

Driver age group All vehicles Cars
Younger (17 to 29) 0.45% 0.29%
Middle (30 to 59) 0.30% 0.22%
Older (60 and over) 0.11% 0.05%

 

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Contributing to collisions

In 2022, 22 people were killed and 652 injured in road traffic collisions in Great Britain, where the driver was assigned the contributory factor of using a mobile phone.

This compares with 85 deaths and 4,103 injuries in collisions where ‘distraction in vehicle’ was recorded as a contributory factor.

It should be noted that figures for contributory factors relate to collisions where a police officer attended the scene and recorded at least one factor, which, in their judgement, contributed to the crash.

It can be difficult for a police officer to identify certain factors that may have contributed to a collision after it has occurred.

This should be kept in mind when interpreting these figures, which could be underestimates.

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Eyes on you

The statistics were gathered using images captured by Acusensus roadside technology.

It also showed that 4.8% of vehicle passengers were not wearing a seatbelt.

Geoff Collins, from Acusensus, who conducted an in-depth analysis of the figures, says that, when extrapolated to reflect the millions of journeys made each day, the numbers are “alarming”.

“Drivers who don’t wear their seatbelt are likely to continue this behaviour throughout an entire journey, adds Collins.

“If seen mid-journey without a suitable restraint, this will probably have been the case all the way. However, hand-held mobile phone use is not usually continuous, so it might happen multiple times during a single journey, but not necessarily at the survey point.

“Because of this, it is possibly misleading to think that more seatbelt violations occur; it is more likely that overall occurrences of distracted driving for any one journey are many times higher than monitored during this survey.”

It is important to understand that the Acusenses system is only deployed in one place, on one road and at any one time.

“Based on the observed violation rates from the surveys, if this was extrapolated across the entire network, it is likely that cars would account for more than 30,000 cases of illegal mobile phone use each day, with a further 20,000 or more cases from vans.  This is despite there being only a quarter the number of vans using our roads, compared with cars.”

Each site was surveyed on a weekday, either in the morning or afternoon, for a period of six hours, and these observations were then analysed by human review.

Acusensus ‘Heads Up’ technology uses roadside cameras to capture clear images through windscreens.

It also uses Artificial Intelligence-based image analysis to flag likely violations, although this was not used in the DfT study.