Anecdotes rarely give us an accurate account of something like this.

If we look at total driving fatalities from 2005 to 2011, the number of motor vehicle fatalities has actually dropped from 43,500 to 32,300.

Distracted driving is around 10% of fatal accidents, but the numbers appear to be falling. Its involvement in crashes has dropped, from 39,000 in 2005 to 32,000 in 2010. Fatalities due to distracted driving has dropped from 43,500 in 2005 to 32,800 in 2010. All this at a time when cell phone / smart phone / texting, and awareness of distracted driving by data collectors, has undoubtedly increased.

So either people are getting better at driving while distracted, or they are distracted less than in 2005.


Pedestrian fatalities are in absolute terms lower - 4,900 in 2000, down to 4,280 in 2010. Bicycle fatalities also haven't changed much since 2000, around 700 per year.

So cycling is just as safe now as it has been for well over a decade.


Of course there can always be local variations, and obviously more can be done to mitigate distracted driving. But it seems likely that you (and most of us) are just noticing it more acutely, rather than distracted driving actually going up.