Temporal analysis of cellphone-use-involved crash injury severities: Calling for preventing cellphone-use-involved distracted driving

Abstract

With the popularity of smartphones and the increasing dependence on cellphones, cellphone-use-involved distracted driving has become a global traffic safety concern. Calling, texting, or watching videos while driving could have harmful impacts on driving abilities and increase crash-injury severities. To investigate the temporal stability and the heterogeneity of cellphone-involved crash injury severity determinants, a series of likelihood ratio tests and random parameters logit models with heterogeneity in means and variances are estimated. Cellphone-involved single-vehicle crash datasets of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2019 are utilized. Marginal effects are also applied to investigate the impact of explanatory variables on injury severity outcomes. The results indicate an overall temporal instability of cellphone-involved crashes across different periods. However, driving without seatbelts and overturns are observed to produce relatively stable and positive influence on the increased injury severities of cellphone-involved crashes. Besides, it is noteworthy that a combination of cellphone usage with risky driving behaviors (aggressive driving, alcohol- or drug-related driving, speeding, or fatigue driving) significantly increase driver injury-severities. This finding highlights the necessity of identifying drivers with multiple risk-taking behaviors and enacting laws to prohibit these drivers from using cellphones while driving. Applications of smartphones provide another feasible approach to prevent using cellphones while driving. Insights and suggestions of this study would be valuable to mitigate the negative outcomes of cellphone-involved crashes and prevent the crashes caused by cellphone-involved distracted driving in the future.