Assessing different methods for detection of distracted driving

October 2023

Roadside observations provide insight into the prevalence of distracted driving on American roadways. Traditional observational studies require the use of observers stationed on the roadside who manually annotate the behavior of passing drivers, while camera-based methods allow researchers to code distracted driving from photos without an observer on the scene. The current study compared the accuracy of a traditional in-person roadside observer with a camera-based method in identifying driver distraction. Both methods distinguished cellphone distractions from other behaviors with high accuracy, although the in-person observer performed slightly better than the camera-based method across most specific behaviors. This study demonstrates that both in-person and camera-based observations are reasonably accurate approaches for measuring the prevalence of cellphone distractions on the road. Camera-based methods may provide an advantage to in-person observers by enabling observations on roadways where it is not feasible to station a human observer.