And so increasingly dangerous

No, this is not, as some might presume, about the bears in the above video.

Compared to the drivers on Anchorage roads, the city’s bears are a tiny, tiny danger. Drivers more interested in their phones than paying attention to the potentially deadly weapon in their hands are the real danger in the 49th state’s largest city, as they are in most U.S. cities today.

And film-making wannabes at the wheel only add to the danger.

The American Automobile Association first warned of this two years ago in a story headlined “Driving While Filming: Social Media’s Dangerous Trend.”

“Driving while filming is dangerous,” country’s leading organization for motorists said. “So why are people on social media doing it?

“An average of nine people are killed every day in the United States because of distracted driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And one in five people who are killed due to distracted driving are pedestrians, including people walking and bicyclists.

“This means that when you text or look at your phone while you’re driving, you’re not just risking your own life. You’re risking the lives and safety of everyone around you.”

So why are people doing it? For the obvious reason. They can attract attention in a society that has become attention-obsessed. Thus, the bigger question here is this:

Why is social media encouraging this form of distracted driving?

Obviously, Nextdoor – where the above video was posted – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and the rest can’t do much to stop people from texting while behind the steering wheel, but they could pretty easily crack down on filming while driving by blocking videos recorded by drivers.

You might have thought they’d have done something after AAA issued its warning, but they didn’t. And the problem is only getting worse.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in August reported that crashes involving people taking their eyes off the road while driving continue to rise while at the same time going alarmingly underreported by law enforcement.

Compounding distractions

“Anything that takes the driver’s focus away from driving – including eating, talking or even daydreaming – increases crash risk,” the independent, nonprofit scientific and educational organization said. “But the risk is more severe for more complex tasks that take the driver’s eyes away from the road. Looking away from the road for just two seconds doubles the risk of a crash or near-crash event.

“The trend toward screen-based smartphone apps makes that especially worrisome. Though voice commands make old-school actions like calling and texting safer, gaming and social media apps offer new temptations. In many jurisdictions, the laws have yet to catch up.”

One has to put amateur filmmaking now high on that list of “new temptations.” When the Arizona Department of Public Safety decided to crack down on filming near a fatal crash on Interstate 10 in May, officers cited 67 motorists in a matter of hours.

“The lookie-loos really are what causes a lot of our traffic issues and often lead to what we call secondary crashes,” Public Safety Sgt. Kameron Lee told KTAR News in Phoenix. “We found through data that those secondary crashes many times end up worse than the first crash that started it in the first place. This is just one particular location at one particular crash scene. Unfortunately, we as troopers see it all the time.”

The Institute study didn’t specifically quantify how much amateur filmmaking is now taking place, but you don’t have to spend much time on social media of any sort to find a driver posting a video of something shot from the driver’s seat with a handheld phone.

And many of these homemade, eyes-off-the-road videos – as with the one displayed at the very top of this story – exceed the Institute’s “two seconds (that) double the risk of a crash or near-crash event.”

Most of the crashes involving this sort of behavior also go unreported because the vast majority of crashes in which the use of a smartphone by an idiot plays some role are vastly underreported, according to the Insurance Institute.

‘Accidents’

So-called “telematic data, coming “from safe-driving apps that drivers voluntarily enroll in, show(s) that cellphone use prior to crashes is undercounted in police reports by a factor of at least seven,” the Institute reported.

This would mean that 86 percent of the crashes involving a phone go unreported as phone-linked.

There are clear and obvious reasons for this. To start with, law enforcement agencies across the country continue to investigate motor vehicle collisions, with the exception of those involving alcohol or drugs, as “accidents” even though most are the result of human error and many involve drivers failing to pay attention to the road.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) deserves credit for changing the approach to how deadly drunk-driving crashes are handled, but there are no Mothers Against Distracted Driving.  And prosecutors around the country appear reluctant to bring charges against killer drivers for fear of offending motorists or running into motorist-filled juries that decide to let perps walk in the apparent belief that “it could have happened to any of us.”

This is especially true in cases involving pedestrians and cyclists.

After a sober Pedro Quintana-Lujan slammed his pickup truck into a string of cyclists in a bike lane in Goodyear, Arizona three years ago, killing two and injuring 17, local county attorney Rachel Mitchell refused to prosecute the 26-year-old driver because there was “not sufficient evidence to obtain a felony conviction.”

“Quitana-Lujan did have a small amount of THC (a marijuana metabolite) in his system, but Arizona law doesn’t have a set standard when trying to prove impairment with THC,” the Associated Press reported in the wake of that decision in a case that attracted national attention. “A Drug Recognition Expert examined Quintana-Lujan, but the results were deemed inconclusive.”

Quintana-Lujan claimed his “steering wheel locked” and pulled his truck into the bike lane. Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board rejected that claim and concluded the probable “cause of the crash was the pickup driver’s diminished state of alertness, likely due to fatigue. Contributing to the severity of the bicyclists’ injuries was the pickup driver’s speed and lack of response once the crash sequence began.”

The agency added a warning that “drivers should be aware that substances such as alcohol and other drugs (such as the marijuana Quintana-Lujan used to get that THC in his system) can affect sleep quality and that fatigue can lead to driver performance errors such as slowed reaction time and impaired lane-tracking ability. In addition, speeding is one of the most common factors associated with fatal crashes in the United States and is particularly hazardous for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists.”

Unfortunately, warning drivers to stay attentive and keep their eyes on the road when driving has little meaning to some when there are little or no consequences for killing or maiming others. And if the Insurance Institute study of distracted driving is to be believed, there are a lot of distracted drivers killing and maiming people, with many of the dead and maimed  being passengers or drivers in other vehicles.

The data

“To determine how often smartphone use is overlooked in police reports,” the Insurance Institute said, it “worked with Cambridge Mobile Telematics to link crashes recorded by safe-driving apps to police-reported crashes in four states between 2021 and 2024.

“Since police reports do not always record crash times and locations with perfect precision, crashes that occurred within the same 15-minute window and within the same one-mile radius were determined to be a match,” it said. “This generated a sample of nearly 17,000 linked crashes.”

Almost one in 10 of those crashes turned out to involve someone using their phone in the 30 seconds prior to impact. Police reports, however, recorded less than one in 100 people using their phones prior to the same crashes.

“Looking only at active cellphone use,” the Institute said, “the researchers found that drivers tapped, swiped or otherwise manipulated their phones before hundreds of crashes, while hands-free and hand-held calls were comparatively rare. Police reports noted almost none of this activity.”

The Institute said some of these distraction-related collisions could have been due to people staring at navigation systems in their cars and trucks, but added that “nearly 25 percent of drivers who participated in a separate IIHS survey admitted to watching a video on their phone while driving at least once in the previous 30 days.”

Add to that 25 percent the many now using their phones to record rather than watch video, and the number of people not paying attention to the road only goes up.

The Institute did offer a simple solution that might help make roads safer. After Arizona banned drivers from holding phones in their hands, the number of drivers making handheld use of a phone fell by more than a quarter.

But the Institute added that the Arizona law was far from perfect. It was found to have little impact on cellphone manipulation, “an umbrella term that covers scrolling, swiping, typing and any other action that requires holding the device,” according to the Institute.

“‘No holding’ laws are a positive step, but it will take more than better-worded legislation alone to combat cellphone distraction,” IIHS President David Harkey said in 2025 after a study of Arizona’s then four-year-old law.

“The fact that drivers continued to type and scroll in the wake of a law that made it illegal even to hold the device shows how hard it’s going to be to stop this behavior,” added Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at IIHS and the lead author of that IIHS study. “Sustained, high-visibility enforcement efforts are likely needed to make drivers take the new law seriously.”

High-visibility enforcement efforts are now rare in the U.S., and there have been no reports of any U.S. law enforcement entity mining social media for drivers distracted by filmmaking and then citing them, though that would not be hard to do.

Legally, any handheld use of a cell phone is now banned in 27 states, and 44 states have distracted driving laws. 

The Alaska law says a driver “commits the crime of driving while texting…(if) a screen device is operating if the person is driving a motor vehicle.” Given that it is impossible to use a cell phone to film anything without viewing the screen, anyone filming while driving in the 49th state would be guilty of distracted driving.

But the law appears rarely enforced unless there is a collision with a fatality, and even then it appears – if the Institute data is correct – that cell phone use is often overlooked in deadly crashes, which might have something to do with how poorly many of those crashes are investigated.

Few U.S. law enforcement organizations consider thorough investigations of deadly motor-vehicle crashes a priority, largely because society in general doesn’t seem to take road safety seriously.

After an investigation into the California road deaths last year, Cal Matters, a non-partisan news organization, reported this:

“The court records and driving histories reveal a state so concerned with people having access to motor vehicles for work and life that it allows deadly drivers to share our roads despite the cost. Officials may call driving a privilege, but they treat it as a right – often failing to take drivers’ licenses even after they kill someone on the road.”

CalMatters found “a driver with two separate convictions for vehicular manslaughter, for crashes that killed a 16-year-old girl in 2009 and a 25-year-old woman in 2020” issued a new driver’s license by the California Department of Motor Vehicles a few years later.

“The agency gave licenses to nearly 150 people less than a year after they allegedly killed someone on the road, we found,” the report added. “And while the agency has since suspended some of those, often after a conviction, the majority remain valid. In Santa Clara County, a man prosecutors charged with manslaughter got his current license just a month and a half after the collision that killed a mother of three young children.”

California is not an exception here. It is a norm because the idea that driving is more a “right” than a “privilege” is one of the few views shared by large numbers of Democrats, Republicans and independents in the now unUnited States of America.

Thus Kendra Lara, a Progressive city councilor in Boston whose driver’s license had been suspended, felt comfortable explaining to NBC 10 that she drove an unregistered, uninsured vehicle into a Jamaica Plain house at twice the speed limit because she had to drive due to a lack of  “any other opportunities” for transportation.

Politicians like Lara, along with law enforcement agencies and district attorneys unwilling to take bad driving seriously, have managed to normalize bad driving. When Lara was asked what she’d tell her constituents about driving without a license, her answer was that “I have shown myself to be a person of integrity and a member of this community that can be trusted. One mistake does not make one unworthy of holding elected office, not just for me, but for anybody else.”

Or, in other words, it was just an “accident.” Fortunately, no one died in the crash, although Lara’s son, who was in the car but not properly restrained, was injured. Lara eventually negotiated a plea deal which got her off with probation and an order to write a letter of apology to the woman whose home she damaged. 

One would hope that social media, with its power to change the world with subtle influence, might do better in helping to make U.S. roads safer. But apparently social-media businesses are more interested in making money than promoting safety, and videos of “the things you see while driving” do attract eyeballs.