Texting behind the wheel creates a crash risk 23 times higher than driving undistracted

Texting while driving creates a crash risk twenty-three times higher than driving without a phone in hand, a figure the U.S. Department of Transportation has cited for more than a decade to describe the single most dangerous thing a driver can do behind the wheel. The number did not come from a laboratory or a simulator; it came from a fleet of ordinary vehicles wired with cameras that recorded drivers for millions of miles, then compared what those drivers were doing with their hands and eyes in the seconds before something went wrong. Distracted driving killed 3,477 people in the United States in a single year tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the toll has barely eased since.

A camera study of long-haul trucking produced the 23-times figure

The research behind the number began as a trucking safety project rather than a general study of everyday commuters. Investigators with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute installed cameras and sensors inside real trucks and passenger vehicles, then simply watched what drivers did in the seconds before a crash or a near-crash rather than asking them to self-report their habits afterward. The team combined several of these naturalistic driving studies into one dataset, compiling more than six million miles of recorded driving before drawing any conclusion about which specific habits actually caused wrecks.

Text messaging turned out to be the single riskiest behavior the cameras captured, worse than dialing a phone or even reaching for one. “Texting while driving raises a driver’s crash risk by 23 times,” the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute states in its own summary of the finding, a multiple no other distraction in the study came close to matching; reaching for a device raised the risk 6.7 times and dialing raised it 5.9 times, both far below texting’s toll. Eating, talking to a passenger and adjusting the radio all registered as measurably safer than typing out a message.

For the truck drivers specifically tracked in the underlying research, later reported by IEEE Spectrum, the risk multiple came out to 23.2 times as high as non-distracted driving, close enough to the rounded 23 that federal regulators and safety agencies have applied the figure to drivers in general ever since, whether they are behind the wheel of a sedan, a pickup or an 18-wheeler. Commercial truck operators were the population studied first because federal regulators oversee that industry directly, but nothing about the mechanics of typing on a phone while steering is unique to a big rig.

The death toll behind the statistic has barely moved in a decade

Distracted driving killed 3,477 people and injured 391,000 more in the United States in 2015, the year the multiplier study’s findings were widely publicized and the first wave of state texting bans followed, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data cited for that period.

Nearly a decade later, the agency’s own current numbers show the toll has fallen only modestly: 3,208 people were killed and 315,167 were injured in distraction-related crashes in 2024. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still singles out texting as the most dangerous form of distraction on its safety pages, describing a five-second glance at a phone screen while traveling 55 mph as the equivalent of driving the length of an entire football field with no one looking at the road at all. The agency’s broader definition of distracted driving also covers eating, talking to passengers and adjusting a stereo or navigation system, but none of those draws the same warning language texting does.

Younger drivers admit to it most, and most states have banned it anyway

Surveys have repeatedly found that drivers know the risk and do it anyway. One Harris Poll found that 51% of drivers age 18 to 34 admitted to texting and driving, compared with 39% of drivers age 35 to 44 and 33% of drivers age 45 to 54, a pattern that has held across similar surveys for years and tracks with how comfortable each generation is typing on a phone in the first place. Overall, more than 30% of United States drivers say they have recently texted while driving, a share that has proven stubborn even as the death toll and the 23-times figure have both been public for well over a decade. A separate 2016 survey found nearly half of drivers admitted to reading texts, checking directions or scrolling social media at the wheel, suggesting the habit extends well beyond composing new messages.

Lawmakers have not waited for the habit to change on its own. Forty-nine states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands now ban text messaging for all drivers, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, though only 33 of those jurisdictions go further and ban holding a phone at all. That gap between the two counts means a driver can legally hold a phone to talk in roughly a third of the country while remaining barred from typing on it, a distinction that depends entirely on which hand movement a police officer happens to see.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.