PITTSBURGH — The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s latest research finds drivers who have been in at least one crash in the past two years are significantly more likely to engage in risky behaviors like speeding or texting, even when they think the police may catch them.

As the summer road trip season begins, and after three months of staying at home, AAA urges drivers to keep everyone safe on the roads and warns motorists against falling back into dangerous driving habits.

“There seems to be a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ culture with motorists in the United States,” said Theresa Podguski, director of legislative affairs, AAA East Central. “It’s alarming that even though drivers acknowledge the dangers of certain driving behaviors, they admit to doing them anyways. Unfortunately, it’s these bad choices that often lead to deadly crashes.”

The Foundation’s annual Traffic Safety Culture Index (TSCI), which highlights the gap between drivers’ attitudes and their reported behaviors, found that drivers perceive distracted, aggressive and impaired driving as dangerous. Yet many of them admit to engaging in at least one of these exact behaviors in the 30 days before the survey. The numbers were even higher for those involved in a recent crash:

Of all dangerous driving tasks, drivers dubbed these two extremely or very dangerous:

Yet these same drivers say they text when behind the wheel, even believing there is a risk of getting caught by police for reading (43.7%) or typing (42.7%) a text message.

On a more encouraging note, when compared with 2018 findings, drivers reported they are engaging in some dangerous behaviors less frequently. Drivers who said talking on a hand-held cell phone saw the most significant decrease, down from 52.1% to 43.2%, while drowsy driving and texting both fell by 3 percentage points.