A Collision of Trends Affecting AUTO RATE INCREASES - Travelers Insurance

 This arrived via email.

A Collision of Trends Affecting AUTO RATE INCREASES   Thanks to the pandemic, supply chain blockages and labor shortages are joining rising bodily injury costs in contributing to commercial auto rate increases. How big is the issue? See our analysis for some answers.   LEARN MORE

Distracted Driving by the Numbers REACHABLE, BUT RISKY       24% of drivers are responding to work-related calls, emails or texts, as many may be feeling the pressure to always be available.*       2 in 5 managers expect employees to answer work calls while they are driving.*       27% of managers say an employee has had a distraction-related crash while driving for work.*     ---------- "Distracted driving" is when drivers cause accidents or break traffic laws because they weren't paying attention. But it has evolved into a pop culture term applied to a specific disapproved driving behavior: Texting and driving. There are many ways to get distracted while driving, but texting is the only one getting press. Texting while driving is a subset of distracted driving, but distracted driving has come to mean specifically texting while driving. The above email from Travelers Insurance is an example. The subheading is "Distracted Driving by the Numbers," but immediately the topic switches to being distracted generally to being distracted by phones. Two statistics are cited for this. Then, the last statistic switches back to distracted driving generally.  So this phenomena is either sloppiness or a deliberate technique. We think distracted driving propaganda is deliberate. The media and the gatekeepers are engaging in deliberate misrepresentation. Why? Here are the real statistics:   In 2017 there were approximately 35,000 fatal car crashes. Of those fatal accidents, 9% were related to Distraction-Affected (D-A). And of those deadly distracted driving accidents, 14% were due to cell phones. Doing the math, there were 3150 fatalities due to distracted driving, but only 441 of those were due to cell phone usage. That's 1.26% of all traffic fatalities. In other words, the issue is used for manipulation, since cell phone deaths are statistically zero.