Healthy Food Delivery : New Study Reveals Link Between Drivers Who Speed and Use Their Phone While Driving

Thursday, May 7, 2026

New Study Reveals Link Between Drivers Who Speed and Use Their Phone While Driving

Whether you’re the parent of a new driver or just someone who is cautious when they’re on the road, you hope that the other drivers around you are utilizing safe driving practices. But when the rise of new technology meets impatient drivers, you can’t always guarantee that. Insurance companies found a link between speed practices and phone usage.

How Was the Study Conducted?

Nowadays, many insurance companies offer different apps. These apps “promise cost savings to drivers who opt in and exhibit what the insurer deems safe driving.” According to The Drive, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) was able to look at the data that these apps provide.

To run their study, they focused on trips that were “18 minutes (with at least two minutes on an Interstate highway).” The apps utilize phone sensors and GPS to log most of their data. In order to determine if a driver was speeding, the GPS data was matched to a speed-limit database. Meanwhile, “phone use was determined based on ‘significant rotation’ registered by the phone’s gyroscope while the screen was unlocked.”

What Were the Findings?

The numbers were slightly different for highways versus regular roads. However, in both cases, speeding and phone usage showed a positive correlation. The Drive reports that on limited-access highways, IIHS “researchers found that phone use rose by 12% for every 5 mph drivers went over the speed limit.” When it came to other roads, the researchers reported that “phone use rose by a smaller amount—3%—for every 5 mph over the limit.”

Faster roads also saw an increase in phone usage. For limited-access highways where the speed limit is 70 mph, researchers found “a 9% larger increase in phone use per 5 mph over the limit than on similar roads with a 55-mph limit.” For other roads, researchers noted that the “increase in phone use was 3% larger (again, per 5 mph over the posted limit) on roads with a 45-50-mph limit than on roads with a posted limit between 25 and 30 mph, and 7% larger on roads with a 55-mph limit.”

While the idea of using a phone while speeding feels dangerous, the overall findings make sense. People who speed are taking a risk while driving, as are people who use their phones while behind the wheel. It makes sense that risk-taking behaviors would fit together. That’s not to say that all drivers who speed also have high phone usage while driving. Rather, it means that the odds show that risky behaviors tend to go together.