With Your Help New Site Will Pinpoint Distracted Driving Hot Spots

This week we launched a new education and enforcement campaign to to study, enforce and reduce distracted driving in San Francisco. An innovative and integral component of the campaign, which supports SF's Vision Zero goal to eliminate all traffic deaths in the city, is a new crowdsourcing website to identify locations where you see distracted driving and would like to see increased enforcement. By taking a few seconds to describe the behavior and identify the location, you can help us, the Department of Public Health and SFPD better understand and combat this dangerous behavior.

According to the California Office of Traffic Safety, talking or texting on a cell phone is the leading cause of driver distraction, and 80 percent of traffic crashes involve some type of driver distraction. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has also found that drivers who text while driving are 23 times more likely to be in a traffic crash, and that the rate of fatal collisions caused by distracted driving is increasing faster than fatalities caused by alcohol and drug use, speeding, and failure to use a seatbelt while driving.

The crowdsourced data will help select the location of six high visibility SFPD enforcement events targeting distracted driving in early 2018. The SFMTA and SFDPH will monitor distracted driving activity at the chosen locations before, during and after the campaign.

One of the primary issues with collecting data about distracted driving is that it is chronically underreported. This is for a variety of reasons, including a lack of nationwide standardization in police reports, difficulties in being able to determine whether distraction figured into a collision, and an unwillingness of drivers to report distractions.

The distracted driving campaign is funded by a grant from the National Safety Council. In addition to the crowdsourcing tool, the high visibility enforcement events and the program evaluation efforts, the grant will also enable the SFMTA and partner agencies to conduct statistically significant research into San Franciscans’ attitudes toward distracted driving and understanding of California laws that relate to cell phone usage while driving; develop a marketing campaign focused on distracted driving prevention; and partner with third-party app developers to introduce or enhance existing safety features that curb cell phone usage while driving.