Study Says Drivers Are More Likely To Use Their Phones While Speeding Which Makes Me Way More Scared Of Everyone Else On The Road

Texting while driving is illegal in 49 out of 50 states because it takes both your eyes off the road and takes at least one of your hands from the controls, making for an incredibly dangerous situation (Montana doesn’t have a law banning it, if you’re curious). I’ve only attempted texting while driving a few times in my life, and it felt sketchy enough for me to swear off the practice for good.

Banging out texts to the group chat at the speed limit is one thing—at least you’re only breaking one law. But some people even text and drive while they’re breaking the speed limit, which feels like an even more potent recipe for disaster. According to a new study released by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), there is a correlation between speeding and cell phone use. And it’s not the good kind.

The study, which used data from insurance companies’ safe-driving apps on driver phones to collect data, found that drivers are actually more likely to use their phones while speeding. According to the IIHS, this flips the commonly held notion that drivers usually only use their phones at slower speeds, and highlights how frequently people might be combining two dangerous driving activities.

The Results Paint A Scary Picture

In the nationwide study, the IIHS found that as people increased their speed over the speed limit, their cellphone usage also increased. The correlation shifts greatly depending on what type of road the user was on. For example, on highways and other limited-access roads, where you need to enter via a dedicated on-ramp, the share of driving time handling a phone rose by 12% for every 5 mph drivers went over the limit. But on roads where you have to be more actively involved in driving, that percentage dropped. From the IIHS’s release:

On other roads, such as arterials and routes that connect towns, every 5 mph over the local limit was linked to a smaller 3% increase in phone handling. These roads often have traffic lights, intersections, roundabouts and stop signs that require drivers to take action periodically, even when traffic is flowing.

You’d think that as speed limits grow, people would be more attentive behind the wheel, since stuff is going by faster and incidents can occur in the blink of an eye. But according to the data, the opposite is happening. Scarily, the IIHS found that phone usage actually goes up as the speed limits increase. From the report:

The increases were larger on roads with higher posted limits. On limited-access roads with 70 mph limits, for example, for every 5 mph a vehicle exceeded the limit there was a 9% larger increase in phone handling than on similar roads with 55 mph limits.

A similar pattern showed up on roads with more access than freeways. Compared with roads posted at 25 or 30 mph, there was a 3% larger increase in phone handling for every 5 mph drivers exceeded the limit on 45 or 50 mph roads and a 7% larger increase on 55 mph roads.

Why are people mixing and matching these two law-breaking activities? The IIHS has several theories. The simplest is that drivers who take more risks—a.k.a., those who more often use their phone behind the wheel or speed regularly—are more likely to risk doing those things at the same time. Another factor, according to the organization, is related to stress. It references research that shows phone use and speeding spike (separately, independent of each other) during rush hour and school drop-off times.

The IIHS says that it could also be as simple as drivers responding to road cues like lighter traffic, fewer pedestrians, and long gaps between traffic devices like stop signs and stoplights, where you actually have to be an active participant in driving. It sort of makes sense—when you’re cruising down an open, high-speed highway with no traffic and tons of visibility, you might feel more comfortable grabbing your phone to send off a quick text, even if you’re already going 10 mph over the limit.

How They Got The Data

Depending on how you feel about data tracking and big corporations watching your every move, the methodology for getting this level of data will be either deeply fascinating or deeply unsettling. The IIHS analyzed nearly 600,000 trips across the United States between July and October 2024, excluding Alaska, California, Hawaii, and New York. Such a large sample size wouldn’t have been possible if not for the immense amount of tracking data that can now be extracted from each user’s phone, thanks to telemetry-monitoring apps tied to insurance. From the report:

More nuanced information about driver behavior has recently become available with the proliferation of safe-driving apps. These apps, which promise cost savings for drivers who enroll, let insurers adjust premiums based on how each person drives. Using a smartphone’s GPS and other sensors, the apps track speed and location, time of day, events like hard braking and rapid acceleration, and phone use. With large amounts of aggregated data, researchers can now measure phone use much more comprehensively than before.

The study included only trips that lasted longer than 18 minutes and involved at least two minutes on an interstate. The data, supplied to the IIHS by Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), also excluded any driving time spent more than 5 mph under the speed limit, to eliminate data produced from heavy traffic.

If you’re wondering exactly how the study determined a driver was handling their phone while driving, the IIHS provides a pretty detailed explanation that makes me scared to even touch my phone while I’m in my car:

Drivers were counted as handling their phones when the phone’s internal gyroscope detected a significant rotation while the screen was unlocked. The phone-handling rate was calculated as total phone-handling time divided by total driving time. To identify speeding, CMT matched each trip’s GPS location to a speed-limit database. The IIHS researchers then used statistical methods to estimate phone-handling rates for limited-access roads and other thoroughfares, across different posted limits and with different levels of speeding (for example, 5-10 mph over a 60-65 mph limit on a limited-access road).

Bad driver or not, it’s a reminder that no, you’re not crazy, and yes, your phone is monitoring your every move at all times.

What Can Be Done?

While those monitoring apps mentioned above incentivize safer driving by offering lower premiums to people who go the speed limit and don’t touch their phone while behind the wheel, the results from this study prove they can’t ever really fully eliminate the problem.

Police are already on the lookout for speeders and cell phone users, but most of the time, those two types of enforcement happen separately. The IIHS suggests the best way to approach this is to develop safety cameras that monitor for both speed and cellphone use at the same time. Road cameras designed to catch phone users in the act have been used overseas, in places like China, for years now.

Another idea the IIHS doesn’t mention in its news piece on the study, but does mention in the study abstract, is to make roads seem more convoluted to keep drivers’ attention:

Countermeasures that raise perceived roadway complexity may also reduce the likelihood of both phone manipulation and speeding.

How exactly road builders would go about making highways more complex isn’t clear. Maybe a bollard that pops up from the ground once in a while, at a random time in the day? Or a stoplight that turns red every 45.6 minutes? Maybe highway workers can simply start occasionally releasing robot dogs into the road that drivers need to avoid. That would certainly get me off my phone and lock into the act of driving. If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com