It’s probably no surprise that despite horrific tales of distracted driving, Illinois continues to figure prominently on the graph of unflattering statistics.
A new study conducted by Zendrive discovered that among 3.1 million drivers and over 5.6 billion miles of driving, nearly 88 percent of those trips included at least some use of a smartphone. When extrapolated for the entire driving population of the U.S., that equals out to roughly 600 million distracted trips per day, and on average, phone use was 3.5-minutes per hour of driving.
Placing firmly on the list of offending states is Illinois, whose drivers spend more than 5 percent of driving time on the phone. That’s just below the 7.5 percent high, which belongs to Vermont. But surprisingly, Illinois is one of six states among the top 25 that enforces a ban on cell use while driving, making it one of the few in which the law doesn’t appear to discourage people from doing so. At the local level, Chicago is one of two major cities that ban cell use while driving, yet the city places in the top five of municipalities with the “most distracted” drivers.
That’s in stark contrast with six of the top ten states where people spend the least percentage of time on their phones, including Oregon and California, all of which have also passed laws imposing restrictions on phone use while driving.
Other notable stats and context from Zendrive:
- Taking your eyes off the road for two seconds increases your chance of collision 20-fold
- At 55 mph, two seconds is enough time to travel the length of two basketball courts
- Drivers’ phone use is extremely difficult for crash investigators and traffic safety experts to measure
- In 2015, 91percent of Americans owned mobile phones and drove over 3 trillion miles
- In 2015, 35,092 people died in traffic, and NHTSA reported just 476 mobile phone related deaths
- After a steady 40 year decline, U.S. traffic deaths shot up in 2015 and 2016, exceeding 40,000 for the first time in a decade
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