It’s not new, but, is this starting to happen a lot?
‘Kids say they take a quick look at TikTok’: a new kind of distracted driving is on the rise
Jackie was on her way to a doctor’s appointment last fall when she realized her Uber driver’s eyes were not fully on the road. “He had a video playing on his phone and was intermittently looking at it,” she said. Jackie, who is 32 and lives in New Jersey, could not tell exactly what the driver was watching, but she remembers seeing shots of people talking – she guessed it was a video podcast. “I was definitely feeling a lot of dread and distress.”
As they continued on their 40-minute drive down the New Jersey Turnpike – a hectic highway that is not easy driving – Jackie considered saying something. But she felt vulnerable as a rider. “I was alone in a car with someone who was already doing something I found shocking and reckless,” she said. “I didn’t know how they were going to react.”
Jackie, a publicist who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, made it to her appointment safely, but the experience rattled her. And it happened again just hours later.
Since cellphones became ubiquitous, drivers have been texting behind the wheel, leading to awareness about “distracted driving”. Slogans such as “It can wait” or “Arrive alive, don’t text and drive” are blazed on highway billboards across the country, and 49 states and Washington DC have instated laws against it. (Montana is the one holdout.) But experts – and plenty of drivers, passengers and pedestrians – have clocked a new culprit: people watching videos, such as YouTube or TikTok, while driving.
Look, it’s not just the yutes, certainly older folks do it, but, it is mostly the younger Millennials and the Gen Z who are the problem. When companies required everyone to come back to the office the roads suddenly became a mess in 2022 in spots that had never been a problem. I cannot take 540 if I have to be at work by 830 anymore. If you’re at a stop light you can expect that one of them will be slow to go, and, when they do go, they barely touch the gas pedal, driving like grandma in a TV commercial or movie.
They’re texting, they’re talking while holding the phone in their hand on speakerphone (like their car doesn’t have Bluetooth. Heck, they might be holding it while talking on BT), they have it on a holder while talking on video, they’re making videos, and, now, apparently, watching more and more videos. I have a theory: it’s not just all that stuff, it’s that they have a very short attention span. They cannot keep their eyes off their phones for long. They constantly have to peek at it. Hold it. Their eyes aren’t staying on the road.
I mentioned that the 2026 CRV Hybrid does not have a screen you can watch to see the instant fuel economy screen, where you can see if you are doing good with MPG. People in hybrids and EVs kinda obsess over this. You’re constantly peeking at it. But, most of the older folks who can afford them are good drivers, confident. They do not keep their eyes on the screen, it’s almost like looking around to see what is happening to watch out for trouble on the road. The kiddies are not. The road is almost secondary in their minds. The phone is first. It’s precious. They cannot just be satisfied with Apple Carplay/Android Auto, no, the whole phone.
“People are engaging more and more with their phones [while driving],” said Charlie Klauer, a research scientist and associate professor at Virginia Tech who studies the effects of driving while distracted or fatigued. “The progression has gone from texting to browsing and looking and watching, which we now see a lot of. It’s Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and a wide range of things.”
New drivers, which the NHTSA categorizes as between the ages of 15 and 20, made up the largest proportion of drivers who were distracted at the time of a fatal car crash. Klauer says she sees distracted driving “across the board” in her research, but “it’s through the early to mid-20s that we see very high prevalence of this type of behavior.”
I’ll disagree, and say it’s up to around the late 20’s, from what I see on the road. Maybe there needs to be a law about no phone holders on the dashboard/hanging from the windshield? No holder where they can see the screen upright. Many states do have laws about not being allowed to hold the phone (have you heard about the girl pulled over for holding her phone in her right hand? She doesn’t have a right hand. I think there was some sort of shenanigans). Phones for a lot of people are full on addictions, like opioids. How do we stop this?
Read: UK Guardian: The Kiddies Are Now Watching Videos While Driving »
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