July 1, 2018, brought a needed change to traffic laws in our state. The Hands-Free Georgia Act, in a nutshell, prohibited holding a phone while driving (including at stop lights). The distracted driving statute also prohibited any kind of messaging, emailing or texting — though voice-to-text is allowed. The law also banned watching or recording videos while driving.
The law does allow drivers to touch their phones to manipulate GPS navigation and push numbers for phone calls. And drivers can keep screens on for GPS maps and directions.
Proponents said this law not only made the roads safer, but also made enforcing the most dangerous distracted driving behavior — texting — more attainable. Texting has been illegal for most of this century, but officers could hardly distinguish between that act and dialing a phone.
Whether Georgia’s law and those like it have worked, requires a nuanced answer.
“For your typical primary law with some good media accompanying it, we’re probably seeing something like a 10-15% drop in mobile phone distraction,” data scientist Alex Kerin said while telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 11Alive about laws like it in the United States. “Doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but when you’re thinking that about a third of accidents (nationwide) are probably distraction-related, every bit helps.”
Kerin also noted that distracted driving crashes are vastly underreported. But previous stats, at least, provide a baseline.
Kerin is a director of data science and road safety at Cambridge Mobile Telematics. The Boston company, among other things, develops the data-collection technology that fuels safe driving apps insurance companies use. Kerin and his team also offer data to government agencies on all levels to inform public policy and shape safe driving campaigns.
These campaigns — both at the advent of a hands-free law and continuously after — Kerin said, are among four key factors in their success. Kerin said others are whether the particular regulations are a primary or secondary (if drivers need to be pulled over for another offense first); the distraction rate in the state to begin with; and enforcement.
“If you’re not getting pulled over, if you’re not hearing about friends and family getting pulled over, there isn’t probably a lot of reason for you to pay attention to the law,” Kerin said.
Ohio, which Kerin praised for how well the state government informs residents of its anti-distraction policies, has police motorbikes in traffic. Those officers specifically can ride near cars and spot distractions far more easily than a cruiser on the shoulder checking radar for speeders.
Drivers in Europe, Kerin said, generally drive with less distraction because they are used to roadside cameras surveilling them for speeding and other bad driving behavior.
Georgia did see a decrease in overall traffic deaths in 2018 and 2019, one sign of the hands-free law’s success. But deaths per mile driven rose in 2020.
Kerin’s team has technology that measures phone movements while cars are in motion. The algorithm, which anonymizes that data for these studies, detects what almost certainly is a phone being picked up and uses that to track instances of distraction.
The rate at which Georgians hold their phones while driving is above the national average, Kerin said.
Data from a 2024 roadside observational survey by the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory University focused on distracted driving. The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety included it in a traffic fact sheet. Between May and August of last year, Emory researchers across 400 Georgia sites made 23,000 observations and found that 14.7% of all observed drivers performed some sort of distraction. Distractions included eating and talking, in addition to dialing and texting.
They observed distractions in 16.2% of metro Atlanta drivers, 4% lower than in 2023 and .6% lower than in 2022. Drivers in Atlanta were slightly more distracted than those in smaller cities or rural areas of the state.
Note that prior to the 2018 hands-free law, Georgia already had an anti-texting statute and another one that was all encompassing for distractions.
On that same fact sheet, data through 2023 shows 55% of all crashes in Georgia involved one suspected or confirmed distracted driver. Of all distracted crashes, 79% included another vehicle besides the one the distracted driver was in.
There is some good news: Georgians were roughly 5% less distracted in 2024 than in 2023. But over this three-year study period, nearly 4 in 20 drivers may be distracted at any time or location.
There is too much at stake to not change our driving habits. Transportation is one of Atlanta’s top commodities, and it is dangerous enough when people are locked in. It is unnecessarily tragic when drivers do not make driving their most important task.
Doug Turnbull covers the traffic/transportation beat for WXIA-TV (11Alive). His reports appear on the 11Alive Morning News 6-9 a.m. and on 11Alive.com. Email Doug at dturnbull@11alive.com.
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