Distracted Driving; a Leisure Activity

Jackson Perisutti

Last summer I had an awful commute. One hour there in the morning, one hour fifteen home in the pm rush. The job paid well; it was worth it, but my commute was work. If I worked eight hours in a day, I had over two additional hours of unpaid, unproductive work. If I worked four, I still had the same amount of unpaid labor. But I tried to make it leisure. Almost every day I listened to a new episode of a podcast, a livestream, or an album. I was often distracted, switching one song to the next that would be just oh so perfect for this view of downtown from the highway. In the first few weeks, when I was unfamiliar with my route, driving required my full attention and so I gave it. Each drive my route became more familiar and my habits worse. Towards the end of my internship, I was tossing my phone into the back seat so I couldn’t grab it even if it tempted me.

I wished there would be a direct train from my community across Cleveland to my workplace, a swift electric-multiple-unit from Stadler with wide windows, clean seats, and outlets. I looked jealously at a relative of mine who took a commuter train daily to work, an astonishing hour and a half each way. She was different, her work much more valuable than mine. She could easily spend those three hours daily completing billable labor and spend only five in the office. At the upper echelons of society, workers get paid for their commute, essentially at the point of use. I once heard from an attorney that senior attorneys will bill clients for the time even thinking about work while driving. An economist would argue that expected commute cost (including time-cost) is necessarily factored into the wages of a job, but in my relative’s case, she could spend those three hours on productive, fulfilling labor; or safely read a book, crochet, or gaze out the window. Freedom. As an intern, my work is not so valuable, and the same of my free time.

Economists study the value of leisure—the opportunity cost of work. It’s all of the things I would rather do during my wasted two hours daily on the highway.

That Damn Phone.

Before, one could only day-dream of the things they would rather be doing when commuting. Today, so many delightful activities are right at our fingertips, free at the point of use. Being a safe driver just isn’t something we can leave to trust. As the youtuber Ray Delahaunty revealed with a collage of empirical data in a recent video, the vast majority of people believe themselves to be above average drivers, and the better a driver they think they are, the more reckless, irresponsible behaviors they tend to embody. Budak et al. found that drivers are more likely to engage in risky behaviors on familiar routes than on unfamiliar routes due to the difference in confidence level, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this problem is worse in males (2021).

Distracted driving grew as a cause of traffic fatalities in the 2000s (Stimpson, 2010) coinciding with growth in cell/smartphone ownership (Stimpson et al., 2023). At a given time, one estimate finds that between four and five percent of drivers are distracted, and that the externalities of distracted driving are between two and five cents per mile driven (Karl et al., 2023). The same study found that men are more than twice as likely to drive distracted. The breadth of the window in which drivers are impacted by distraction may be underestimated in the previous study, as uncovered by Snider et al., the mental transition between phone use and focused driving takes between fifteen and twenty-five seconds (2021). Young drivers recognize the potential danger of texting while driving to themselves and may to some extent internalize the externalities via moral virtue, but these values are not reflected in their behavior (Lansdown, 2019).

The book “Transport for Humans” puts it well; “In 2008, four in five UK rail commuters would have been seen reading a newspaper. Just a few years later, though, most had switched to messaging, podcasts, online dating, shopping, snoozing, gazing, and gaming while they travelled. Travel time suddenly became a chance to do a variety of fun things” (2021). For a transit-user, these innovations have made commuting easier dopaminergically, and easier intellectually, especially with the proliferation of route-planning apps like the Transit App.

For the motorist, driving safely is harder than it used to be. Not because the activity itself is worse, but because our tolerance for boredom is worse. Generation Z and Millennials are soon to become the majority of the US workforce. Members of Generation Z spend a significant portion of their leisure time on social media platforms and is thus a primary leisure activity (Yagmur, 2024). Excessive smartphone use leads to intolerance for boredom because smartphones are the easiest "distraction" from feelings of boredom, which is correlated with feelings of anxiety (Tam et al. 2021). Members of generation Z often experience “nomophobia”, which refers to anxiety created by separation from one’s smartphone for an extended period of time (Syafii et al., 2024), for example during a long commute. I do not expect that there is a constitutional way to regulate smartphone use while driving, but even if there is it might not be the optimal decision. Often, it is providing a competitive substitute for risky behavior that truly prevents it. Services like Uber, for example, have made drunk driving much easier to avoid. There is essentially no excuse; when in a pinch, you could find someone to drive you at a reasonable cost compared to the risk of driving, but it would not be surprising if being drunk makes it more difficult for a person to make that risk evaluation. Evidence on whether ride-share apps such as Uber have reduced accidents or fatalities related to drunk driving are mixed. An analysis of all alternative transportation modes found that ride-sharing was more successful at reducing drunk driving fatalities than the designated driver method (Fell et al., 2020). Anderson and Davis observe that the effectiveness of ride-share have serious flaws in the way they acquire data from each of the available services, and that when studied with complete data that “ridesharing has decreased US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and reduced total US traffic fatalities by 4.0%” (2021). Public transportation is a cheaper but often more time-consuming or intellectually challenging system to navigate compared to ride-share. Interestingly, a graduate thesis from Middlebury College found that cities with robust public transportation actually experience a greater benefit from the introduction of rideshare than those without, indicating that rideshare and public transportation are actually complimentary substitutes for risky driving (Smith, 2019).

Taking Uber for a daily commute is not tenable. There are not enough personal drivers to take enough distracted drivers off the road. Perhaps only in a techno-dystopia commenting on our fear of sharing and addiction to personal property and space. Reorganizing our cities to make public transportation the ideal mode for long-distance commutes would be the most effective way of preventing distracted driving. It is important to communicate to all drivers that those with long-commutes are putting everyone at a higher risk of death, injury, financial ruin, or prison from distracted driving, and that public transportation provides the freedom to use one’s mobile device for work or leisure without such risk. In the context of distracted driving, phone use is an addiction because it is a choice we cannot help but make which puts us in danger. This framing tells us that we must develop self-discipline and coping-mechanisms to overcome this challenge; highly individualistic. When framed as an economic problem, smartphone use is a valuable leisure activity, a revealed preference, we must make space for to keep our community safe; a highly collective framing which points to a long-term solution which does not rely on individual responsibility.

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Works Consulted:

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