Zendrive: lunchtime driving in San Francisco riskier than rush hour

Lunch-hour driving across the San Francisco Bay Area between 11.00am and 2.00pm is riskier than morning and evening rush hour commutes with more than 50% of routes presenting a greater risk to drivers during lunch hour. These latest findings come from Zendrive’s Bay Area Commute Safety Snapshot which also revealed that the San Mateo Bridge is overall more dangerous during morning commutes between 6.00am to 11.00am.

The study measured phone use and aggressive driving across 1,250,000 trips by 100,000 drivers in November 2017. It focused on 62 routes going to and from the city-county, including I-280, which it found to be more dangerous than U.S. 101.

Zendrive aggregated and anonymized 100,000 individual drivers via sensors in smartphones and analysed their behaviour in real time. It based its inquiry on phone use (handheld, hands-free; texting/emailing; and physically engaging with a phone while the vehicle is moving), rapid acceleration, speeding and hard braking.

In April 2017, Zendrive released the distracted driver behaviour survey which found that Americans use their mobile phones 88% of the time they get behind the wheel.

Jonathan Matus, CEO of Zendrive, said: "Commuters use their smartphones all day, and on the road, doing what they believe makes them more efficient multi-taskers. But that has resulted in some of the riskiest driving behaviour. Crashes and car-related fatalities are at an all-time high, in large part because of distracted driving. Our safety snapshot finds that using your phone while driving can have hazardous results. We hope to shed light on how widespread risky driving has become, and to help break hard-working commuters of these driving habits."

More information on how each major Bay Area highway and commute route ranked is available %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 link-external here false https://www.zendrive.com/commute/ false false%>.