Has Driving Behavior Changed?

If you’re feeling less safe driving on the nation’s roads than you used to, it’s not your imagination, according to Gary Hallgren, president of Arity, a B2B mobility data and analytics company owned by Allstate.

“You’re entirely right [that] driving behaviors have gotten worse,” he told Carrier Management. “We’ve seen that the speeding and the distracted driving that was to some degree prevalent before the pandemic has only gotten worse—and meaningfully worse.”

“Distracted driving maybe has toned down a little bit in the last year, but by toned down meaning that it’s just not going up as fast as it was. It’s still 30 percent higher than what it was before the pandemic, and the amount of speeding continues to go up,” he said.

According to a recent Arity survey report, “Data in action: Solving the driving safety crisis,” almost one-third of drivers (32 percent) don’t view distracted driving behaviors like using their phones behind the wheel as “extremely unsafe,” even though it’s an increasingly common cause of fatal crashes.

Drivers remain unconcerned about other common behaviors proven to cause accidents—like speeding, hard braking and fast acceleration—according to Arity’s survey of 1,000 licensed U.S. drivers in Q1 2024.

Only four in 10 drivers see hard braking (38 percent) as extremely unsafe.
The percentage viewing speeding as extremely unsafe is similar (42 percent).
24 percent of drivers see fast acceleration as a neutral behavior, while 11 percent see it as safe or extremely safe.

Arity also found that the majority of drivers, 79 percent, believe that individual drivers bear the greatest responsibility for improving driving safety, and 86 percent of U.S. drivers are willing to share their driving data if it contributes to the possibility of saving lives on the nation’s roads.

Asked specifically about sharing data with auto insurance companies, more than half said they are comfortable doing so.

“Overall, willingness has trended up,” Hallgren said. “I’ve been doing this now for nine years. and I think understanding is growing,” he said, advocating more education of drivers about how driving behavior data can be used to create a safer future.