Experts say in-car smartphone use and dashboard apps are partly to blame for alarming rise in highway fatalities in the US in the past two years
The messaging app Snapchat allows motorists to post photos that record the speed of the vehicle. The navigation app Waze rewards drivers … Tweets: @amyklobuchar , @benrosstransit , @nytimesbusiness and @nytimes Tweets: Amy Klobuchar / @amyklobuchar : Remember: No text is worth it. No snap is worth it. No tweet is worth it. http://nyti.ms/2eVSmSJ Benjamin Ross / @benrosstransit : Tech distractions growing cause of traffic deaths, but regulators stand back as automakers add more featureshttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/ 11/16/business/tech-distractions-blamed - for-rise-in-traffic-fatalities.html ... @nytimesbusiness : Snapchat, Waze. Even Pokémon Go is distracting drivers. Hands-free apps are blamed for a surge in highway deaths http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : “A crisis that needs to be addressed”: Highway deaths last year recorded the largest percentage increase in 50 years http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 report was the early alarm: experts tied a two-year rise in US highway fatalities partly to smartphone use and dashboard apps — Snapchat's speed-stamped photos, Waze's driver rewards — while, as transit analyst Benjamin Ross noted, regulators stood back as automakers kept adding in-car features. Senator Amy Klobuchar's response distilled the stakes: no text, snap or tweet is worth a life.
The years after confirmed the pattern rather than refuting it. A study of Pokémon Go's first months counted hundreds of extra crashes clustered near PokéStops in one Indiana county, putting numbers on app-driven distraction. Waze's routing engine meanwhile pushed cut-through traffic into residential streets, prompting Leonia, NJ to close 60 of its streets to outsiders. And by 2021 Tesla was shipping over a dozen video games playable while driving, drawing safety criticism on top of its Autopilot record.
First-order effects
- Drivers face an expanding set of attention-grabbing features — Snapchat speed posts, Waze gamification, dashboard apps — at the same time as fatality statistics worsen, with no regulatory brake applied.
- Automakers adding cockpit features now carry the reputational risk that Tesla drew for its drive-time games, since the distraction critique extends from phones to built-in screens.
Second-order effects
- Municipalities absorb the cost of navigation-app routing: Leonia's mass street closures show local governments acting where federal regulators won't, a template other cut-through-plagued towns can copy.
- App makers' engagement mechanics — rewards, streaks, speed-sharing — become a liability surface, inviting the kind of crash-attribution scrutiny the Pokémon Go study demonstrated is possible.
Third-order effects
- A structural accountability gap emerges: when Tesla's autonomous-driving safety claims later proved hard to verify because of missing public data, the same opacity problem extended from distraction features to self-driving claims — leaving regulators without the evidence base to intervene in either.
- If engagement-optimized software keeps migrating into vehicles faster than rulemaking, road-safety policy shifts from regulating drivers to regulating product design — a jurisdictional fight between transport regulators and app platforms that has barely begun.
The trend: Consumer software is colonizing the driver's seat faster than safety regulation or public data can keep up, turning every engagement feature in the car into an unpriced road-risk externality.