Talking Michigan Transportation

Evidence mounts that distracted driving laws make a difference

• Season 7 • Episode 212

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On this week’s edition of the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, an update from Ryan McMahon of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a Massachusetts-based firm that tracks data from drivers, participating voluntarily with their insurance carriers, to analyze statistics and driver behavior. 

McMahon spoke on the podcast previously, including a few months after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the law making it illegal to use a hand-held electronic device while driving.

His analysis includes data on distracted driving in Michigan broken down by county. His firm is reporting updated numbers that show meaningful strides in the right direction. 

McMahon also cites preliminary data showing a reduction in crashes in Michigan in 2024.

Jeff Cranson:

Hello, welcome to the Talking Michigan Transportation Podcast. I'm Jeff Cranson. Today I'll be speaking again with Ryan McMahon of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which is a Massachusetts-based firm that tracks data from drivers, a Massachusetts-based firm that studies data from drivers participating voluntarily with insurance companies. That allows for the analysis of statistics and driver behavior. He's got some updated numbers from Michigan now that we're a couple years into our law concerning distracted driving, and breaks down those numbers in geographic ways that are very interesting, and has a lot to say about the conversation in DC about this going forward and what it really means in terms of creating safer roads and reducing crashes. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. So, as mentioned in the introduction, again I'm with Ryan McMahon of Cambridge Telematics. He's visited the podcast a few other times, the first being after Governor Gretchen Whitmer here in Michigan signed the distracted driving law. He always has updates as he tracks these things very carefully, carefully and whether it's made a difference in what the similar laws have done in other states. So, ryan, thanks again for taking time to do this.

Ryan McMahon:

Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate this. It's a great forum that you've created here.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, so you were in DC in February during the AASHTO Washington briefing and got a chance to talk to a lot of DOT officials from around the country, and before that I think back in 2024, you were able to present to a US DOT panel on this and your findings and what's going on with that. So let's talk first about that and how that went and what the interaction was.

Ryan McMahon:

Yeah, it's been interesting. CMT has been paying attention to the risks that cause crashes for over a decade and it's been interesting as we have kind of taken the work that we've done to understand what causes crashes and bring that analysis forward to individuals outside of the insurance industry. We really kind of started paying attention to what behaviors cause crashes so that insurers could help reduce those crashes via incentives, and that work has paid dividends for the industry. It grew to the point where I think it's probably around $4 billion spent by the insurance industry now to reduce crash rates with their drivers through incentives. And that work has translated, I think, really well to those that are trying to build infrastructure and trying to create policies that make roads safer outside of the commercial context. And that led us to the conversations at USDOT last year and at USDOT last year it was, I think, maybe the second time that they have had a forum like this focused on distracted driving, and I was not at the first one, so this was just coming from folks that we've spent time with, and the change, I think, has been the number of people that have, I think, put time and energy to help understand what causes crashes and put strategies in place that reduce those crashes. I think that if you were at the forum this year, there were tech companies, there were researchers, there were a number of different advocacy organizations and I think a lot of the conversation in the early days was talking about things like don't text and drive and this sort of the early days of cell phone. But because the cell phone has permeated so much of our life, we've seen the impact on transportation and we were presenting last year essentially on a decade worth of findings that showed that and I've talked about this on this podcast too. But 34% of crashes a driver's phone is in their hand a minute prior to that crash happening. Driver's phone is in their hand a minute prior to that crash happening. And I don't think that that is just as well understood in the body of the road safety community, because the information that's used to understand what causes crashes is kind of missing that component. So from that work we have been able to continue to bring more people in to have conversations about what that has created from a risk perspective.

Ryan McMahon:

And I don't know if you know this, but on the inflation side of things, there's a lot of talk about affordability, a lot of talk about cost. A lot of talk about efficiency. Well, the one kind of thing that's not really well understood all the time is that the dollars that are spent in road safety and the tools and the effectiveness that is used in road safety has a direct impact on insurance prices, and this connection between the insurance industry and the transportation industry is probably more direct than people realize it. Since 2020, I think the cost of insurance personal auto insurance has increased about 52% and that is a huge, huge tax on individuals. And it's not because the insurance industry is reaching higher profit margins.

Ryan McMahon:

In fact, over that period of time, they saw some of the worst profit years that they have experienced, and a part of that reason ultimately came down to an erosion of road safety, and a part of that reason ultimately came down to an erosion of road safety, and a lot of that had to do with distracted driving. So I think that this connection on the impact of distracted driving, the impact of crash severity, the impact of crash severity on basically the profitability and the cost of owning a car and those that are in the ecosystem, has become more apparent now than I think in the last few years, because that information is more prevalent and I think the more that we understand how road safety and insurance and how these costs are closer tied together, the easier it is to make decisions that are in the best interest of everyone on a safety perspective. Closer tied together, the easier it is to make decisions that are in the best interest of everyone on a safety perspective.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, I think you raise a good point. I can see people who are very skeptical of the insurance industry. I don't think anybody thinks their rates shouldn't be lower, but they probably think that. Well, why would the insurance companies incentivize us in ways that lower our rates? Then they don't make as much money? Well, the bottom line is, when you have crashes that went up at the rate that they did, especially severe crashes with the pandemic and the speeding and the distracted driving, that means insurance companies are paying out a whole bunch of money. So I think that's probably something you can't emphasize too much.

Ryan McMahon:

Yeah, and the thing about that is it's not just the good driver or it's not just that those that are committing those offenses are paying for it. We're all paying for it because the insurance industry had so much uncertainty on safety over the last four years that they didn't really have the ability to differentiate between safe and unsafe drivers, and it's not like they have the ability just to target the rate increases to those drivers that were unsafe, because what was happening was kind of the book was thrown out the window. They were seeing loss results that didn't really conform to prior history, and I think a lot of that had to do with things like distracted driving, because you can't have a behavior that's so concentrated in crash rates but yet so the laws and the tolerance to this issue don't lead up to the same level of its impact. The impact is far higher than people realize and because it's not well understood in kind of the general analysis when you go to buy insurance, there's really no way for the insurance company to know the difference between a safe and an unsafe driver on a prospective basis when you look at the differences of behavior that have changed so significantly. So people were having crashes that didn't have crashes before they were having more severe crashes and those crashes unfortunately led to historic losses of life for people both inside and outside of the vehicle.

Ryan McMahon:

So the only way that the industry responded to that and this is before inflation, this happened before our dollar didn't go as far. It created this level of uncertainty for the insurance industry and they had to raise rates and that increase of rate. Unfortunately, the only way for an individual to find a pathway from that was really to show and create their own motor vehicle safety record. And that, to me, is really where the insurance industry has stood out and done something different, because they are giving tools to consumers to reduce their rate with their own individual driving behavior. But obviously it's optional. Only those people that want to opt into those programs are opting in. It's not a mandatory component, so it's available, so it's not like that's the only tool that can be used to solve this problem. The additional tools are absolutely in the playbook that DOTs and public safety have been using for years and in Michigan's case it is working.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, along those lines, and this is, I know, outside the realm of your expertise. But people that build their homes in vulnerable places, you know wildfire zones, flood zones, etc. That affects all of our insurance rates too, right something that's really hard for people to understand.

Ryan McMahon:

On the good and the bad side, a lot of people play the lottery and, you know, a lot of people are engaged in behaviors that aren't immediately going to create a negative outcome for them, whether that be engaging in safety behaviors that you know, distracted driving, et cetera. But when you look at the aggregate and you look at these big numbers, it becomes clear. And that's where to me, on the homeowner side, things like building codes have made such a huge difference. As somebody that lives in a hurricane prone area, you can see the impact from houses that are built to withstand, an infrastructure that's built to withstand the risks of today, and the difference between those structures that were built prior to that. So to me, the the ability to withstand and build resiliency is so critically important.

Ryan McMahon:

Um, the challenge when it comes to to the roads is that it's it's an activity that is so incredibly uhught with risk, but so few people see that on a regular basis, and that's a good thing, right, it's a good thing that most people aren't experiencing crashes. But if you talk to the people that work in your field and you talk to people that work in law enforcement and I used to be an EMT while I was going through college. It's a real thing, that happens every day. People are seriously injured and lives are disrupted from crashes. But the challenges of building resiliency can't just come from the car. That's the reality of it. You can't just build safer cars and hope that it fixes things, because even in that case, even in that case, in the last few years, we saw something like a 46 year high in fatalities. That happened from automobiles, from people that are outside of those automobiles.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, yeah, because, as you and I have discussed before, we've created more and more ways to make our cars safer, but we've also created more distractions. I equate it to, you know, to weapons more distractions. I equate it to, you know, to weapons. And over hundreds of years, we've created better weapons. We've created better armor. Then we create better weapons.

Ryan McMahon:

So it's yeah the thing is, the challenge from that is is there really is no, only a one-sided arms race. There's no bicycle helmet and no pedestrian tool that's going to stand up to thousands of pounds of weighted speed when someone's not watching where they're going.

Ryan McMahon:

And ultimately, at the end of the day. To me, distraction is so dangerous because any kind of distraction, if you're not able to focus on the road in front of you, you just can't avoid the crash. And it seems like such an obvious and basic thing. But it's one of those behaviors that gets ingrained because you can pick up your phone and look at it for a moment and be safe, but yet you know it works until it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, the results are terrible.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, you can't human proof the cars and you can't human-proof the road system. There's going to be human behavior and a lot of humans don't like the fact or don't want to believe the fact that computers are better. They don't have all of the distractions and emotions and things that lead to errors and judgment and crashes. But talk again because you've talked about this before and I want people to be reminded of all the insurance carriers that participate and the voluntary nature of this, because I could see and you might have run into some of these questions in DC and other places from you know people very concerned about privacy and pushing back on whether or not this kind of tracking you of tracking should be out there.

Ryan McMahon:

Yeah, it's totally optional. So the piece that, to me, makes this such an important program for individuals is you basically have you can think about insurance pricing in really one of two buckets. One is the default rate, and that default rate is based on information that's already known about you and your peers, and your peers could be separated into lots of different categories your peers relative to the number of years you have driving. The peers that drive around you. The peers that are driving the same type of vehicles. The peers that have the same type of record that you do behind the wheel if you've had a ticket or an accident. The challenge with the default rating is, though, that that is based on history and then using history in similar groups to prospectively analyze and understand where your crash rates will be in the future, and that's called actuarial science, and it works incredibly well. It really does. It's the same type of things that are used to understand the differences of a smoker versus a non-smoker in life insurance, and that work has helped increase longevity and has helped improve wellness and all those pieces.

Ryan McMahon:

The challenge is, when it comes to auto insurance, is that the behaviors that occur in the past aren't necessarily always representative of the behaviors that happen in the future. Because the frequency of crashes is so high the likelihood of you getting into a crash is much, much higher than any of the other insurance claims that people typically deal with. It's a very high frequency and also high severity event. So what the insurance industry realized is that there's a difference between drivers that exhibit safe behaviors actively when they're behind the road and those that don't, and those safe behaviors, when they're analyzed on an active basis, can actually be much more predictive than the default way of measuring to understand risk. So for consumer, that consumer has the option to take the default rate and be rated based on their peers and all the other components that go in and all the factors that go into that, or they can choose to have a rating that's actively they participate in and when they actively participate in it. The insurance company offers them an app to download. In most cases that consumer downloads the app. They are actively getting information about how each trip that they're taking is impacting their risk, how that risk impacts what they pay for insurance and over time. What that means is that the insurance company can build incentives by lowering the rate, showing the consumer that you know behaviors like speeding behaviors, like distracted driving, behaviors like hard braking increase the risk for that individual. And if that individual is willing to lower their risk, they can pay less for insurance.

Ryan McMahon:

And I was in Michigan I think I was in Lansing when I was presenting at a road safety conference a few years ago and someone walked up to me and showed me that they were saving 40% on their insurance with Nationwide. They walked up and showed me that and all the leading insurance companies have programs like this and the reality is that if you are a safe driver, you're probably paying too much because in the default category they just don't know the difference between a driver that is actively engaged in safe behaviors and those that aren't. They just know what the same pool of individuals are. So if you want to have the lowest rate possible, the lowest rate possible is available for you if you can demonstrate your safety. And it's not about tracking. Tracking has nothing to do with it. It's about specific behaviors that lead to crashes, the insurance company sharing that information with you and then you making a decision to, number one, participate or not and two, to change the behavior or not.

Ryan McMahon:

Because the really surprising thing about these programs is we don't really get a lot of feedback on our driving from places that we trust. You get feedback from people that ride in the same car as you and it's pretty rare that you take that in a positive manner backseat driver, et cetera. You get feedback from other drivers on the road and they display that via sign language sometimes. And then you get feedback from other drivers on the road and they display that via sign language sometimes. And then you get feedback from roadside interaction with police and there's really no tool that's just for you, that helps you understand, that also gives you an incentive. So that's really what the difference of these programs are and, from a privacy perspective, what we have been able to do is understand the aggregate risk from all of these behaviors and understand how that aggregate risk creates crashes, and then from that we can talk about that aggregate risk.

Ryan McMahon:

But for you as an individual, your record stays with you and the company that you've engaged with. It's not being exchanged, it's not being sold, it's yours and you control it with the company that you're engaged with and in the vast majority of these programs to opt out at any time, there's like 10 to 15 different ways to do it Turning it off with your insurance company managing it directly on your phone. You can turn off a number of features. You can have privacy controls it's yours. But the bottom line is that if you want to have a program that is actively giving you number one feedback, that is yours that you can use to put money in your pocket and, two, pay the lowest rate. Because the insurance industry knows that there are behaviors that lead to crashes, they're willing to share that with you, and there's very few other tools that are out there that give drivers as much control or give you as much control in something that is really so critical to your health and safety too.

Jeff Cranson:

Please stay tuned. We'll be back with more Talking Michigan Transportation right after this. Please stay tuned.

MDOT Message:

We'll be back with more Talking Michigan Transportation right after this. You looked, you looked again. Put the phone down and pay attention when you drive, so you arrive alive. Remember, don't drive distracted.

Jeff Cranson:

I was wondering if that reflects population, that obviously you've got fewer drivers in the Upper Peninsula and some of the northern lower counties, or is that some other kind of per capita basis?

Ryan McMahon:

It's per capita, yeah, so it's based on minutes distracted per drive hour. So if there's more drive hours in an area, then we would know that you know there's more distracted driving. Five hours in an area, then we would know that there's more distracted driving. So it's all relative. So there is a relativity about the approach.

Ryan McMahon:

What's interesting in Michigan and I think that if we take a step back, the work that goes into passing legislation to improve roadway safety is very hard, because you're asking legislators to put a law in the books that their constituents may. Their experience with that law may be a ticket, a fine, and that's not a popular thing with legislators, certainly, and not with the general public. But the reason that there's a fine and that traffic stops exist is for safety, and I think that it gets lost in a lot of the conversations, especially when people are learning to drive, people are afraid of getting pulled over all the components that exist around that. The reality is that the only reason that law enforcement is involved in this is that we have built a system that relies on everyone doing their job behind the wheel and if they don't, then tragedy happens and there's so much human error that goes into the system and there's willful ignorance to understanding that the road is a shared resource and that we have the need to observe this very intricate level of rules to make sure we're all safe. And some people ignore that.

Ryan McMahon:

And when these laws are passed, you hope that it has the intended effect and in some cases in the past that they haven't. In some cases you've seen a drop. That's happened with the behavior like distracted driving and then it comes back and actually kind of trends back with wherever the US trend is and that's not been the case in Michigan. Michigan has been successful and in fact, the more recent the law 2023 and forward those laws have actually been more successful than any prior to that and I think it's a nature of kind of how people are understanding and how these laws are being enforced and communication programs around them as well. But in Michigan there's been a 10% drop that's been sustained all the way through the entire year of 2024. So the law gets impacted and we freeze whatever distracted driving is at that point and if we can play that forward and look at the distracted driving is at that point and if we can play that forward and look at where distracted driving was prior to the law going into place and look at where it is. And this is the phone is unlocked, the vehicle is moving and it's being interacted with. We have no idea what is being done on the phone. The sensors just tell us that there's distraction, that's happening, that the phone is being interrupted with the accelerometer and the gyroscope. When we look at that behavior, we lock it in before the law goes into place and we look at at the end of 2024, 10 percent reduction from those two period points. It's amazing to see that. It's interesting.

Ryan McMahon:

There's two sides of this for me that I think about a lot. One of the sides is that it's impressive that we have a reduction in behavior and that reduction is greater than the overall country and it's actually probably one of the highest that we've seen sustained over 24 months or, sorry, over 2024. The problem is that it's only 10%. So the challenge that we have is in combating a behavior that's so hard to change. So we get excited and put a lot of emphasis and celebration around a 10% reduction, but there's more work to be done because we know that every 10% of time that is spent distracted driving, so every 10% distracted minutes per drive hour, I believe that the number of crash, the frequency of crashes, increases by about 1.9 percentage points. So it is incredible to see the impact, but we need to do more. But the two sides of my mind are always looking at can it be sustained over a long period of time and what tactics are working and how do we change that to make it work even more effectively?

Jeff Cranson:

Well, it's very difficult. I mean again, you know as well as I do that younger generations feel invincible and think it's not going to happen to me and they're more likely to take risks, which is why insurance rates are set the way they are. And you know, introducing all of the various devices that distract us into the equation the last several years makes it even more difficult, and people with the governor's traffic safety council in DC have told me that, based on their focus groups and their messaging, that fear of dying doesn't necessarily resonate with kids of a younger generation. It's other things, like being badly disfigured, that scares them. So it's really difficult to find the things that are going to get through to them. But I think fines, I think passing these laws and fines I mean they've found that that's been very effective with drunk driving. As you know, you see a lot of PSAs that focus on how much it's going to cost you rather than you know what the physical damage could be, and that resonates with younger people. So I think you're talking about the same challenge really.

Ryan McMahon:

Well, here's the amazing thing If you look at the data kind of at a month-by-month basis, when the law was passed, there was, I think, a 20% drop in the number of minutes that people were holding their phone to their ear behind the wheel. And that is such an easy behavior to move to Bluetooth, to move to other tools. And we know that that behavior leads to crashes, because not only is the driver not as ability you know, they're cognitively not as able to address the issue that may appear in front of them but just physically as well, they have less ability to manage it. So we know that that behavior can change. We know that the amount of distracted driving behavior can change. The challenge is of making sure that it's consistent and not just putting all the emphasis behind things like Distracted Driving Awareness Month, April. It's important to have these times and it's important to build these communication tools, but the reality is this behavior is much harder than seatbelts. It's, I think, much harder than substances as well, because every person has their cell phone with them all the time.

Ryan McMahon:

And a new distraction can appear at any minute, versus putting a seatbelt on. I mean it is. You know you can do it one time when you get in the car and you're done you drive. The challenge behind putting the phone away and and managing the phone is that it's always with you and it's always trying to fight for your attention. So that's the piece that I celebrate. When we can, we can turn the tide in the other way, and I think mich Michigan should be. I think that the bottom line is that we should be really happy with where the state is right now and we should be looking to understand what's working, what's not, and make sure that we don't give any ground back.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, no, that's a good way to wrap it up, and I always appreciate what you're doing and the insight you bring, and I'd like to think that that decline we don't have the final numbers, but what looks like a decline in crashes in 2024 has something to do with this. So that's all very good. Thanks, as always, Ryan. I look forward to catching up again in six months or so to see what the latest is.

Ryan McMahon:

Sounds great, Jeff. Thanks so much.

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.