Talking Michigan Transportation

Report: Seat belt use slides slightly in Michigan but fewer drivers using hand-held devices

• Season 6 • Episode 202

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On this week’s Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, Timothy Gates, associate chair for undergraduate studies of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Michigan State University, talks about a new report on the use of seat belts and hand-held devices by Michigan drivers.

The report shows 92 percent of front-seat occupants in Michigan wear seat belts, down from 92.4 percent in 2023 and 92.9 percent in 2022.

Gates talks about the demographic breakdown within those numbers, which show younger male drivers are less likely to wear seat belts. He also discusses the different kinds of drivers who populate the roads in the wake of the pandemic, as remote work remains the norm for more white-collar workers.

Also discussed: speeding continues to be a problem post-pandemic, Gates says. 

Jeff Cranson:

Hello, welcome to the Talking Michigan Transportation Podcast. I'm Jeff Cranson. Today I'm speaking with Tim Gates, who is a professor at Michigan State University. He and his team have studied a number of things related to highway safety human behavior, the things that we do that cause crashes, and a recent report is out looking at seatbelt use and also touches on handheld device use in vehicles and it's a bit of a mixed bag. Seatbelt use declined a little again, but it's pretty marginal and we're actually seeing a slightly decrease in the use of handheld devices since that law went into effect, and he has some theories about why that is and talks in depth about the report and what it shows. So I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Jeff Cranson:

Tim Gates, thank you again for taking time. You've done the podcast before and I always appreciate your insights. You've spent a lot of time and led teams and collaborated with teams on some really important studies and reports related to safety and driver behavior and lots of things that matter to all of us, since most of us drive and most of us are on the roads. I know a lot of the media reports on this. Most recent study, focused on seatbelts, seemed kind of alarming, but overall, in broader context, it sounds like you see some seeds of hope in this.

Timothy Gates:

Yeah, that's right, Jeff, and thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. Yeah, so, obviously, the number that got reported from Michigan this year for safety belt use for front occupants was 92% 92.0%, which is down from 92.4 a year ago and then in 2022, it was 92.9%. So, we're almost a full percentage point down over the last two years, and, you know, in comparison to last year, it's down. We call it marginally down, it's not, it's certainly within a margin of error, but our long-term trends we are seeing. If we look at, let's say, post-pandemic to pre-pandemic, there's a definite downtick in safety belt use in Michigan for front occupants compared to pre-pandemic levels, and Michigan's not alone in that. The nationwide data is showing the same thing that there's a slight post-pandemic and it hasn't rebounded at all, but a post-pandemic decrease in safety belt use.

Timothy Gates:

I do want to kind of mention, like you hinted at, there actually are some bright spots that we found with this year's survey and specifically, if you recall, back July 1 of 2023, that's when the new handheld device or hands-free device use law went into effect for the drivers, which basically states that if you're using a mobile device in your vehicle it has to be hands-free, and that was again went into effect July 1 of 2023.

Timothy Gates:

And so when we compared last year's safety belt survey, which includes that survey of driver mobile device use we compared last June so June of 23, just before the law went into effect to June of 24, 11 months after the law went into effect we saw about a 1.2% decline in handheld use by drivers. And so last year we saw 6.7% of drivers were using mobile device handheld, either holding it to their ear or texting. This year that was 5.5%. So again, 1.2 percentage point decrease and that's significant. So that is good news. So we actually, for the first time since we've been doing these surveys of handheld device use by drivers, we're actually seeing a decrease in use, and so that's a positive and so that would suggest.

Jeff Cranson:

Do you feel like that fits with what you see anecdotally? I'm thrilled about that number, and it tells me that the education efforts are having an effect and working. But I still feel like I see maybe not as much on the freeways but on local streets. I still see a lot of people holding a phone in their hand.

Timothy Gates:

Well, I'd like to think that the freeways, but on local streets I still see a lot of people holding a phone in their hand.

Timothy Gates:

Well, I'd like to think that the survey numbers, considering how many drivers we actually observe, that these numbers are real, right.

Timothy Gates:

So, but you know, can you actually notice a difference in 1.2 percentage points in drivers from last year to this year?

Timothy Gates:

You know who's to say. I probably wouldn't be able to to make that determination myself, but when, when, when we're talking about, you know, 15 to 20,000 driver observations, um, that's quite a bit right, that's, that's a fairly large number, you know, and if we've got tens of thousands of actually hundreds and hundreds of thousands of trips that are being made where that 1.2% more drivers, 1.2 percentage point more drivers, have their eyes on the road, focus forward and on the road instead of on their phone, then that could actually, we would expect at some point that that's actually going to start showing up in crash data. Fewer rear, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and I'm not going to speak of, you know, of specific crashes that have happened lately, but there have been a lot of crashes in the news lately where there's been either proven distraction or some, you know, possible or probable distractions that have contributed to crashes, and so anything that we can do to help reverse the trend of distracted driving crashes is positive, in my opinion.

Jeff Cranson:

No, I agree that percentage sounds small, but when you think in terms of the numbers that you're talking about and what that percentage means to that vast number, it's significant. But most significant is trending in the right direction. It's trending in the right direction.

Timothy Gates:

Right, and hopefully we'll see long-term trend too. I'd love it if next year we saw a little bit more of an improvement or at least not rebounding back up. I'd love to see that downward trend. And again I'd like to see hopefully the safety belt use rate stabilizes or even starts to tick back upward a bit. You know I wouldn't be get your hopes up to have a a massive increase in safety belt use rate again, because we're sampling from the same site same day of week, you know, same time of year each year. Um, so you really don't expect to see the needle move too much. But I would like to see things stabilize and then maybe start to creep back up a little bit again so that we're back up into the upper 92s, 93s, 94s at some point, because again, pre-pandemic, we were hanging around 94, and now we're down hanging around the 92. So there's a definite decline.

Jeff Cranson:

I have some personal theories on why these things changed during the pandemic and I think just a sense of the same thing that made people rebel against masks made them just rebel against other rules, including speed limits and seatbelts.

Timothy Gates:

Well, and like I said though, jeff too, we do have a different. We've taken a lot of white-collar jobs out of the commuter pool. You know there's a lot more working from home. Now we all understand that a lot more working from home than those jobs are not necessarily ever going back to working in the office or, you know, in person, and so it's a different. So not only are you taking those people out of the driving mix, at least during commute times, but you're also reducing the congestion. You're reducing the number of vehicles on the road, so that speeds would have a tendency to trickle upwards a little bit, because there's more, you know, there's less congestion, less vehicle-to-vehicle interaction, so speeds would have a tendency to go up. So these are all things that are kind of interlinked. It's not only just the drivers, but it's also the fact that you have fewer vehicles on the road, so the tendency to be able to speed at a higher rate travel at a higher rate of speed is higher?

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that I'd be interested to know if you were able to cross check your demographics for phone use with seatbelt use, and is it the same young males in pickup trucks that are also using their phones at a higher rate?

Timothy Gates:

Well, let me real quickly jump to that part of the report. There are some similarities and I don't want to misspeak here, so I want to pull up that particular section. Macomb and Wayne counties if we look, just isolate those counties. They have handheld devices. They have much lower safety belt use rate and much higher mobile device use rate, particularly younger. No surprise that younger drivers are more likely to be using their device handheld. I don't, however, think we see as much related to what we see with low safety belt uses young males in pickup trucks. It's definitely young, young folks across the board. So age is the biggest determinant of mobile device use by drivers and I don't think that comes as a surprise to anyone.

Jeff Cranson:

No, definitely not you know if we want to talk numbers we can. Yeah, delve into the numbers a little bit Sure.

Timothy Gates:

Yeah. So if we look at the handheld device use now, yeah, so handheld device if we look incidents of handheld device use total a little over 1,000 out of the 20,000, 20-plus thousand driver observations that we had. So, yeah, obviously about 5%. If you look at the rate for those over the age of 60, only 1.4% of persons over the age of 60 were using their handheld use of the mobile device, contrast that with persons in the 16 to 29 age group, so the under 30 age group 9.2% of those drivers were observed using a device in handheld mode. So, again, either texting or talking with handheld. Now, somewhere in between is that age group from 30 to 59 years old, and that was 4.4% of drivers. So there's a clear age-related trend there.

Jeff Cranson:

So do you think? I mean? You know messaging and public service announcements aren't your area of expertise, but you've looked at this long enough to see the trends. Do you think there's an effective way to message to young males in pickup trucks?

Timothy Gates:

I've got to be honest. I think enforcement is probably the most effective way of getting to people, basically getting people to change their behavior. We know there's a number of different methods to try to get people to change their behavior marketing, advertising, education but enforcement, in my opinion, even though it probably would be a bit more costly, if there was some targeted enforcement campaigns that were going on, similar to like the click it or ticket, I think those would have the biggest. Just, you know, the threat of the ticket would probably have the biggest impact. But I think it does appear that word is getting out.

Timothy Gates:

If you know again, if you're designing an advertising campaign, I would say, yeah, target it at younger people. Speak their language, you know, show younger people in the advertisements. So you know, put it on TikTok, whatever, because that's where we can really make the gains. If we can drive, it's not the older people, it's not people over 60, it's people under 30. And if we can get the people under 30 to put the phones down and use in hands-free mode only which, incidentally, we actually do also track hands-free mode.

Jeff Cranson:

But now, since the laws has been in place, we're actually doing our longitudinal trends, are looking only at handheld mode, since hands-free is legal I wonder what age you really do start to hit on that, even before a teenager is driving age, if you start figuring out effective ways to tell them ahead of time.

Timothy Gates:

And I think it's on the parents to exhibit the behavior themselves, right, yeah, so the kids learn it right, and having a child who has just recently gone through driver's training, it's interesting. I should probably ask her if her driver's training classes and her materials she got during driver's training did focus on the new law the hands-free law, sure, but she might be able to tell me that. So I know that when she drives she's very cognizant of not touching her phone, and even keeping her eyes off her phone if she's got it on a little holder off to the side to not be distracted by that.

Jeff Cranson:

Stay with us. We'll have more on the other side of this important message.

Safety Message:

In Michigan. Safety comes first on the roads. To combat distracted driving, Michigan passed the hands-free law.

Timothy Gates:

The law makes holding or manually using a cell phone or other mobile electronic device while operating a vehicle a primary offense. This means an officer can stop and ticket you for violating the law.

Safety Message:

This can include, but not limited to, sending or receiving a call, sending, receiving or reading a text or email, accessing, reading or posting to social media sites or entering locations into the phone GPS.

Jeff Cranson:

With this law in place, drivers are encouraged to stay focused, keeping their hands on the wheel and their attention on the road. Drive smart, drive safe, drive hands-free.

Jeff Cranson:

Michigan's hands-free law Drive safe Drive hands-free, michigan's hands-free law, making the road safer for everyone. So I wonder, when my daughter was in high school and before she went off to Michigan State a few years back, I asked her to talk to her friends about this topic and what messages resonate with them, and she recorded some videos that I actually used at a presentation of my counterparts from around the country and almost to a one. They said you know, a sign on the road or a TV ad that tells me I shouldn't text and drive is not going to really change my behavior, you know, just telling me that I need to know something more tangible about the effects. And that fits with what the Governor's Highway Safety Association and some other national experts have told me that they've found the things that resonate most with teens is fear of disfigurement, that they fear that more than dying, because that just seems so abstract.

Timothy Gates:

And it also fits with I think you've seen ads that focus on drunk driving and the demographic I've seen some pretty gruesome ones that circulate on social media that are obviously staged but they're pretty gruesome and yeah, those I think would have quite an effect comparatively Well the studies show that what has the most effect on the demographic most likely young males again is how much it costs if you get busted for drunk driving.

Jeff Cranson:

Yes, as opposed to you know the the fear of injury or death for you or somewhere else. So I mean that's natural, right, we were all invincible at a certain age. We thought we were, and you know that's. That's understandable. But, yeah, the messaging is a challenge. So, yeah, I'll be curious to hear what you find when you talk to your daughter about it and what she hears from her friends, because maybe in the last 10 years you know this is broken through and that would be a great thing.

Timothy Gates:

Yeah, but but you know, bottom line is is you've got to customize the. If it's an advertising campaign or educational campaign, it has to be customized towards that demographic and so, you know, speaking their language, understanding what pulls the lever for them, is really important. So, and like I said, we know that it's not the persons over the age of 60 that have the problems with the handheld devices. Sure, they still. You know 1.4%, but that you know it's for the younger group. They're using their handheld devices at greater more than a 4%, or four times the rate of those persons over the age of 60.

Jeff Cranson:

But it sounds like a main takeaway for you is that, while this number for seatbelt usage seems to have gone in the wrong direction, it's really, it's marginal. It's you know, to use the term that everyone's familiar with now because people are following political polling so closely it really is within the margin of error. Yeah.

Timothy Gates:

Well, yeah, within a one-year period. Yep, it's definitely within one margin of error. It's definitely within a margin of error. It's not statistically significant change from the prior year, but there is cause for concern if we look at pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic, and again, we're seeing this downward trend there. If we look at pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic, we are definitely seeing a significant downward trend.

Timothy Gates:

And so, knowing that we're not going back to pre-pandemic, what can we do? So, again, how can we market or how can we target our advertising campaigns towards improving safety belt use rates? So, basically, the biggest bang for the buck, what can we do to target the areas, the demographics, et cetera, where we would stand to gain the most, et cetera, that, um, where we would stand to gain the most? And again, those are going to. We do have some demographics and some areas that are in the low 80% for safety belt use rate. No-transcript. You know it's not necessarily in the suburbs, it's really, you know, kind of more in our urban core and in our very rural areas. It's really a dichotomy if you think about it. The dense urban areas and the very rural areas tend to show the lowest safety belt use rate.

Jeff Cranson:

Do you have anything? I know it wasn't a part of this specific report, but we know that speeds increased during the pandemic for all the reasons that you mentioned, mostly because there were just fewer cars on the road and the less congestion there is, the faster people go and that's come down some. But I get the feeling again, anecdotally, that we're not back to pre-pandemic speeds on the freeways anyway. So is that your feeling too?

Timothy Gates:

Yeah, we're not back to pre-pandemic speeds. I don't know if we ever will be either, but we're. Yeah, speeds are still higher than they were pre-pandemic. Um, uh, how much higher, I you know, I can't say, but I know that you know, for the most part, if we were to generalize things statewide, that highway speeds are higher, uh, post-pandemic than pre-pand pandemic. Volumes are still a little bit lower. I don't think we've rebounded 2019 volumes yet either. We've certainly rebounded from like 2020 to 2021 levels, but not all the way back up to 2019 levels.

Jeff Cranson:

What do you think? I mean your background and you've been at this, you know, and gone to higher education and got advanced degrees and obviously you have a real passion for this. Do you find it frustrating to dig into this the way you do and not see great gains, or do you take satisfaction with the incremental changes that you see?

Timothy Gates:

Well, a little bit of both. I mean, we know that it's very difficult. There are only a few things that really move the needle in a large sense, and enforcement is one of those things. But enforcement is expensive and it has to be regular. I mean, there always has to be that threat. As soon as the threat's gone, then the behavior returns to normal. But enforcement is one area I'm not surprised. None of us are really surprised by or get too concerned about changes, year-to-year changes. When we look at long-term changes, there's a little bit more cause for concern. But I also do think again, when we have a new law and there's penalties associated with that law and that law is being enforced, like the hands-free law, and we do see relatively large improvements you said 1.2 percentage point is a significant improvement. That is I. You know I I'd like to say, yeah, that the law is that we'll see long term, but I'd say that that's a pretty effective um law, at least within that first year. It'll be interesting to see how that, how those numbers, hold each year thereafter.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, and the state police have done some, some stings and targeted enforcement on that and they, they, they put the word out ahead of time, just like they do, you know, with drunk driving stings. You know it's not like they're. They're trying to be secretive about it. They, for the most part I don't think any police agency really is all about generating revenue and passing out citations. If they can change the behavior, that's a win, right.

Timothy Gates:

Right. So, whatever needs to get done, whatever is effective in terms of changing behavior, is what we should focus on, and, of course, some are more expensive and human resource intensive than others. Enforcement is very expensive and resource intensive, but advertising and marketing campaigns if there's effective strategies there, then that's where you want to focus your efforts.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, well, yeah, and you compare those prices to the costs of injuries and property damage and death, then it doesn't come close.

Timothy Gates:

And Jeff, I'm assuming. So one area that I am extremely encouraged and was happy to see is that the Senate passed the package of bills that included the use of speed safety cameras in work zones, so automated camera enforcement in highway work zones which had passed the House maybe a couple of years ago and had just been sitting in the Senate, but I saw that as of early November. I think it might have been November 7 that that got sitting in the Senate, but I saw that as of early November. I think it might have been November 7 that that got passed through the Senate.

Jeff Cranson:

It got passed through the Senate and the House concurred last week, so it's enrolled now and waiting for the Governor to sign it. Waiting for the Governor's signature. Yeah, and so there again is a strategy.

Timothy Gates:

I'm really excited about that because it reduces the need for human enforcement right, so we can do things with automated tools. It keeps our officers safe. They're not out there in the work zone. But if it can have again, if it can have that same level of effectiveness and that, you know, does remain to be seen does it have the same level of effectiveness as having a human officer enforcement enforcement? You know that'll be really interesting and I'm excited to see where that goes. I'm hopeful that it gets signed, but I'm excited to see where that goes.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, it had a lot of support from labor as well. As you know, MITA, the Infrastructure Transportation Association in Michigan. So, yeah, I'm excited about it too. I think that it's-- I mean, we know that half the states have this and it's made a definite, a significant change in all those states. And just knowing that those are out there, you know, again, it doesn't have to be about citations and generating revenue. The hope is that people know there's a camera on you when you're going through those work zones. You're going to slow down, yep.

Timothy Gates:

It's the threat. It's the threat of a fine. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, thanks, Tim, for talking about this. As always, I appreciate it. I really do appreciate the work you do and the passion that you bring to it, and that Michigan State University puts a premium on it and lets you and your colleagues do the work you do.

Timothy Gates:

Sure. You're welcome, Jeff. I appreciate it. Thank you for the invitation.

Jeff Cranson:

I'd like to thank you once more for tuning in to Talking Michigan Transportation. You can find show notes and more on Apple Podcasts or Buzzsprout. I also want to acknowledge the talented people who help make this a reality each week, starting with Randy Debler, who skillfully edits the audio, Jesse Ball, who proofs the content, Courtney Bates, who posts the podcast to various platforms, and Jacke Salinas, who transcribes the audio to make it accessible to all.