Distracted Driving High-Visibility Enforcement Demonstrations in California and Delaware

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates 10% of fatal crashes (3,328) and 18% of injury crashes (421,000) were attributable to distracted driving in 2012. Previous research indicates dedicated law enforcement over a specified period coupled with enforcement-based messaging can reduce observed electronic device use rates. A demonstration, consisting of four high-visibility enforcement (HVE) waves, conducted from April 2010 to April 2011 in Syracuse, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut, saw hand-held phone use drop 32% (from 3.7% to 2.5%) in Syracuse and 57% (from 6.8% to 2.9%) in Hartford (Chaudhary et al., 2014; Cosgrove et al., 2011). Having evidence that high-visibility enforcement is effective in a controlled community setting, the next step was to examine the effectiveness of implementing distracted driving HVE campaigns over a widespread, multi-jurisdictional area. Following a methodology similar to the Connecticut and New York studies, NHTSA initiated two large-scale HVE demonstrations in California and Delaware to examine whether distracted driving-focused HVE can be applied to larger geographic and demographic areas.