Distracted driving is widespread across the United States. While no driver is immune from distracted driving, not all drivers face the same levels of risk. Distraction levels vary from state to state. For instance, the most distracted state is 33% more distracted than the national average.

Why does distracted driving look different across states? Legislation and safety strategies are big factors. Drivers in states without hands-free laws are 9.5% more distracted than drivers in states with hands-free legislation, and states with hefty fines and effective awareness campaigns have reduced distraction by over 20% since 2022.

Another factor that impacts distracted driving is how rural or urban a state is.

To understand the impact of rural and urban settings on distracted driving, we combined state-by-state urbanization data with our phone motion data. To determine how urban every state is, we used FiveThirtyEight’s “urbanization index” — an analysis based on “the average number of people living within 5 miles of every census tract.” We classified states as urban or rural by averaging the urbanization index and dividing them into two groups: those above and below the average.

We found that drivers in rural states are more distracted than their urban counterparts. On average, drivers in rural states were nearly 11% more distracted than drivers in urban states. 

The impact of this 10.7% higher level of distracted driving among the 58 million drivers in rural states is more crashes caused by phone use behind the wheel. Compared to urban states, this resulted in an estimated 33,000 more crashes, 18,000 injuries, 150 fatalities, and $1.3 billion in economic damages in 2023. (These figures are based on CMT research that shows that for every 10% increase in distracted driving, the rate of severe injuries and fatalities rises by 1.5%.)

The difference in distraction between urban and rural states is nearly identical to the difference in distraction between states with hands-free laws and states without them. This could be because urban states are more likely to be hands-free. It could also be due to rural states having fewer drivers and roads with fewer obstacles, which can give people a false sense of security when using their phones while driving. This was present in the early days of the pandemic when drivers stopped using their cars, roads cleared out, and distraction surged.

You can find the distraction levels of the urbanization index for each state in the table below.

Zooming in on distraction in rural states

The difference in distraction rates between urban and rural states is similar to what we find between hands-free and non-hands-free states. However, the impact of hands-free laws is even more evident when comparing rural states without these laws to rural and urban states that do. 

Rural states without hands-free laws see 14.7% more distracted driving than urban states with hands-free laws. This means that drivers in rural states without hands-free enforcement are 2.3% more likely to be injured in a serious crash caused by a distracted driver than in an urban state that’s hands-free. 

The impact of hands-free laws is amplified when looking at rural states with and without hands-free legislation. The five most rural states with hands-free laws saw 14.8% less distraction than rural states without — with drivers averaging 1 minute and 32 seconds of distraction. To learn more about distracted driving in each state and for nationwide trends, read our 2024 report.