The One Driving Habit Money Can’t Fix

When researchers paid nearly 1,500 drivers to drive in a safer manner, people responded by speeding less, braking more gently, and accelerate more smoothly. However, when they were asked to put down their phones behind the wheel, that didn’t happen regardless of financial incentives.

In the nationwide study, weekly text messages about driving habits plus cash incentives successfully reduced speeding, hard braking, and rapid acceleration by double-digit percentages. Handheld phone use while driving? Completely unchanged. Drivers kept their phones in hand just as much as people who received no feedback or money at all.

The finding reveals something uncomfortable about distracted driving in America. We can change our behavior behind the wheel when there’s money on the line, but not when it comes to our smartphones, at least under the kind of incentives tested here.

Changing Driver Behavior

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety recruited 1,449 drivers through social media ads between January and March 2024. About one in five American drivers is estimated to be enrolled in programs that track their driving through smartphone apps, typically offering discounts for safer habits. The team wanted to determine if being monitored and rewarded actually changes behavior.

After monitoring participants for six weeks without comment, researchers split them into groups. Three groups got different types of weekly feedback on their driving: some on all four risky behaviors tracked, others focused on one at a time. All could earn up to $100 in safety incentives on top of $150 for completing the study. A control group continued being monitored but got no feedback or incentive money.

The app tracked phone use, speeding, hard braking, and rapid acceleration, scoring each behavior from 0 to 100.

Three Out of Four

The interventions worked, mostly. All three treatment groups became noticeably safer drivers compared to the control group. Depending on which group they were in, participants reduced speeding by 11% to 13%, hard braking by 16% to 21%, and rapid acceleration by 16% to 25%.

But every single group spent just as much time on their phones as before. No change during the three-month program. No change during the six weeks afterward when researchers kept monitoring but stopped providing feedback.

Why would speeding respond to incentives while phone use doesn’t? Jeffrey Ebert, the study’s lead author at Penn, suspects the scoring system shares some blame. Participants saw their “driver focus” score (the opposite of phone use) averaged 93 out of 100, while their scores for speeding, braking, and acceleration hovered in the 60s and 70s. That high score may have given people “the false impression” their phone use wasn’t really a problem, even though they were spending nearly four minutes of every hour driving with a phone in hand.

Something deeper may also be at work. Speeding and hard braking may happen somewhat unconsciously. Once drivers become aware they’re doing these things, many can simply stop. Phone use is different. Picking up the phone is a deliberate choice driven by immediate psychological rewards: checking a notification, responding to a message, relieving boredom. The payoff is instant. The risk of a crash feels distant. A $100 payment three months away can’t compete with the immediate pull of a text message.

There’s another factor too. Drivers control the gas pedal and brake completely. But incoming calls and messages create external pressure to respond. The study provided tips about features like Do Not Disturb While Driving, but that wasn’t enough.

Some other studies, using designs focused exclusively on phone use, have successfully reduced it behind the wheel. But when phone use competes for attention with multiple risky behaviors, as it did here, it remains stubbornly resistant to change.

What Actually Stuck

On a positive note, the improvements that did happen lasted. After the three-month program ended, researchers kept monitoring for six more weeks without any feedback or financial incentives. Drivers in all three treatment groups continued speeding less than the control group, and many continued braking more gently and accelerating more smoothly.

This persistence suggests that some drivers may have developed new habits rather than just performing for a reward. Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which provided the tracking technology (97% accurate at classifying which trips participants actually drove), estimates these kinds of improvements could lead to roughly 4% fewer insurance claims and 7% lower crash costs.

The study, published in Accident Analysis and Prevention, worked equally well across age, sex, and race, addressing equity concerns about whether monitoring programs benefit everyone. Rural drivers didn’t improve as much as suburban and urban drivers. More extraverted people were generally less responsive to the interventions, possibly because they crave more immediate social rewards.

Interestingly, it didn’t matter much how the feedback was structured. Weekly scores on all four behaviors worked about as well as focusing on one behavior at a time. The simple act of providing feedback and incentives mattered more than the details.

The Distracted Driving Problem

Motor vehicle crashes kill 1.2 million people worldwide each year, and distracted driving plays a major role. The fact that standard feedback and incentives couldn’t touch phone use, while other risky behaviors responded well, suggests we need fundamentally different approaches to tackle the problem.

It appears usage-based insurance programs can make people safer drivers, just not in every way that matters. Until someone figures out how to curb our collective habit of checking our phones, that particular kind of distracted driving will likely persist. Making drivers 13% less likely to speed is meaningful progress. But if they’re still texting at red lights and glancing at navigation apps in traffic, we’ve only solved part of the equation.

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