Letting Data Do The Driving

In business, being “data-driven” is more commonly considered status-quo or even required in leadership or strategy roles, yet for some reason leveraging data isn’t being harnessed in other aspects of our lives which is why for the past two years I have let data drive my decisions. It is easy to think about data-driven decision making when it comes to business and specifically marketing, yet many of us tend to ignore the data that can influence our personal lives. For example, I met my amazing husband through OkCupid after comparing at least a dozen different online dating platforms and choosing to only meet with matches of 90% or above – my husband and I were a 97% match. We also chose our apartment based on JTurner Research’s ORA? rankings which compiles reviews and ratings across all platforms for every apartment complex in the nation and ranks them in order – we now live in the highest rated apartment in the state of Texas and are loving it! 

Essentially, when I shifted my personal life to adopt data-driven methodologies that I practice everyday in business I began living my best life. It is with this information that I began researching just about every aspect of my day to day life and realized that a big part of that involved being behind the wheel. After suffering a crash of my own last year when I was hit by a distracted driver coming the opposite direction, it got personal.

To our benefit and sometimes even our demise, our brains are designed to recognize patterns and to also fill in gaps of information that the eye can’t see. The information that our brains fills in can sometimes lead to ignoring important details without even realizing it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give our brains a boost in awareness. In fact, by leveraging data in our daily lives we can reduce stress and the resulting mental health issues which boosts productivity and better decision making overall. 

Here is what I mean, data shows that in every which way you boil it down Houston leads the nation in most roadway fatalities. Speed is the leading contributing cause for fatality and distracted driving is the leading cause of collisions. Meanwhile, according to traffic analytics and data firm ZenDrive, more than 60 percent of drivers use their phones during at least part of their commutes each day, with an average of two minutes of phone use per hour. That means with the average Houstonian commuting 24 miles traveling from the suburbs or outskirts of the city have missed about two miles of traveling distance due to distracted driving. Two miles of completely unaware traveling and this isn’t just a danger to the driver actively driving distracted, but this is also an issue for all of us around them as traffic ebbs and flows based on congestion. 

In a moment’s notice during rush hour, traffic can come to a complete stop quickly, but if the person behind you is traveling at 60mph too and doesn’t notice you are stopped for even two seconds they just traveled 176 feet, yet the average vehicle driving 60mph needs 180 feet to come to a complete stop. Better hope they weren’t tailgating and really better hope that they are also not one of the heaviest device users—representing about 1 in 12 drivers and projected to be 1 in 5 by 2022, if the current growth rate persists—spend nearly one-third of their driving time engaged with their phones.

It isn’t just distracted driving that is literally killing us, but it is also high rates of speed. In fact, crashing at high rates of speed is often unsurvivable even in the safest vehicles. It’s important to remember that the forces in a collision quadruple when speeds are doubled, rather than simply doubling, because kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity. To put this in practical terms, a crash at 80 mph carries 4x the energy as a crash at 40 mph, even though the speed is only 2x as fast. Your vehicle is only designed to protect you from a crash with an equal or lighter mass vehicle at 40 mph. Even though the speed limit might be 75mph, that doesn’t mean our brains or our vehicles were built to survive the currently inevitable crashes that occur on these roadways. 

The speed issue doesn’t end on the highways, it really impacts dense populations where people still scurry through neighborhoods and city streets at 40 or 50 mph where the speed limit indicates 30 mph. When we talk about your odds of being fatally injured in a vehicle, the max speed recommended is 43mph, but when it comes to more urban areas where there is a lot of foot traffic and cyclists the speed is reduced to protect these pedestrians and increase commerce. The speed limit of 30 mph isn’t for show, it is to protect the lives of everyone using the roadways. For example, Cities Safer by Design reported that the odds of fatally injuring a pedestrian driving 30 kmph (18.6 mph) is only 10%, but step up the speed to 50 kmph (31.1 mph) and your odds of fatally killing someone jumps up to 85% – could you live with yourself knowing that you took away another person’s life?

Below is a great example of how our brain interprets information at varying speeds. Not only are we more likely to fatally injure pedestrians at higher rates of speed, but we are also less likely to even notice their presence when traveling faster. 

It is with this data that I urge you to let data do the driving. We owe it to ourselves, our families, and our communities to do better. Put down the phone and pay attention – you are controlling a deadly weapon. If you find it challenging to put down your device, then I encourage you to download the app Safe 2 Save which allows you to earn free meals and rewards for simply not using your device while driving.

I encourage each of you reading this to let the data do the driving in your life and more specifically behind the wheel. Be safe.