Speeders Love Using Their Phones, According to Study

What Car Shoppers Need to Know

• The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study finds that drivers are more likely to use their phones when speeding.
• Trend applies on all roads but is particularly pronounced on interstate highways
• Data for study taken from insurance companies’ safe-driving apps

IIHS does a lot more than just smash cars into barriers and report back how safe they are — although they do a lot of that. The institute also conducts numerous studies and analyzes data to better understand trends and other factors that may influence road safety.

The agency’s latest study is alarming and concerning. It suggests that the faster people drive, the more likely they are to use their cellphones. On limited-access highways — defined as roads only accessible via on- and off-ramps — IIHS found that drivers spent 12% more time handling their phone for every 5 mph they drove over the speed limit.

Related: IIHS Adds Speeding, Drunk-Driving Detection to Award Criteria

Insurance Companies Provide Data

Data for this study was aggregated from auto-insurance companies’ apps. These apps use the phone’s GPS and other sensors to track speed, location, hard braking, acceleration and phone use, among other information. Drivers opt into this tracking for the opportunity to pay reduced insurance rates if their driving is judged to be safe.

But even among this self-selecting group, IIHS found that people tend to use their phones more the faster they are driving. Compared to roads with 25 to 30 mph speed limits, the likelihood that a driver would use their phone increased by 3% for every 5 mph over the limit they traveled on roads with speed limits of 45 or 50 mph. On roads with a 55 mph speed limit, drivers are 7% more likely to use their phone while speeding.

Ian Reagan, the IIHS senior research scientist who wrote the study, noted, “It’s alarming that the relationship between cellphone manipulation and speeding was the strongest on roads with the highest speed limits.”

Possible Explanations and Potential Actions

Reagan also suggested some possible explanations for the IIHS’ findings. Perhaps the simplest is that both speeding and using their phones are behaviors of drivers who take more risks. But stress may also be a factor. IIHS says phone use while driving tends to spike during rush hour and school drop-off times — times when getting to their destination on time may also lead people to speed.

However, other nuances of this latest analysis may also soften the alarm. Data processed for the study consisted of some 600,000 trips between July 2024 and October 2024. It originated from various insurer apps across all the contiguous U.S. except California and New York and only included trips of at least 18 minutes with more than 2 minutes of highway driving. To weed out time spent in heavy traffic, data from periods spent driving more than 5 mph below the posted speed limit were excluded. Reagan notes that drivers could be looking at their phones when traffic is lighter and there are fewer pedestrians and stoplights along their routes.

Still, it only takes one other car or pedestrian for tragedy to strike, which leads IIHS to a rather contentious suggestion: Police could use more traffic cameras to monitor both speed and phone use.

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