The Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE) has been awarded $302,150 from the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety to measure seat belt use and driver distraction rates across Georgia, according to an April 1 announcement. The funding will support statewide observations in 2026 aimed at understanding factors that influence safe driving behaviors, such as gender, race or ethnicity, and age group.
This research is considered important because it helps inform strategies to improve road safety. By identifying trends in seat belt use and distracted driving, officials hope to target efforts that can reduce injuries and fatalities on Georgia roads.
Between May and August 2026, trained observers from IPRCE will visit 400 sites in 20 counties throughout the state. They will record whether drivers and front-seat passengers are wearing seat belts and note instances of driver distraction like hand-held device use. This marks the fifth consecutive year IPRCE has conducted roadside observations for these behaviors.
Jonathan Rupp, PhD, director of IPRCE at Emory University School of Medicine, said: “The rate of seat belt use for drivers and right front passengers in Georgia during daylight hours was 87.9% in 2025, which is effectively unchanged from the 2024 rate.” He added: “In contrast, rates of hand-held cell phone use by Georgia drivers significantly decreased to 5.1% in 2025 from 6.6% in 2024. We hope the data will help the state target efforts to increase seat belt use and reduce distraction.”
Allen Poole, director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety said: “Innovative projects like this are designed to help Georgia and our nation to reach the realistic goal of zero traffic deaths by the middle of this century.” Poole continued: “Each life saved on our roads is one less family that will have to live with the pain of losing a loved one whose life was taken from them in a traffic crash that was completely preventable.”
Data collected by IPRCE show that in 2025 right-front passengers had higher rates of seat belt use (92.2%) than drivers (87%). Minivan occupants used seat belts most frequently (95.7%), while truck occupants had lower usage rates (79%). Women were more likely than men to wear seat belts (90.7% versus 85.5%), with highest usage among those aged eight-15 years old (92.4%) or over age seventy (92.1%). For hand-held device use while driving in Georgia during daylight hours last year, men were observed using devices more often than women (5.4% compared with 4.7%), with metro Atlanta showing higher overall usage at nearly six percent.
Founded in 1993 as a collaborative research center addressing injury prevention issues across communities within Georgia and the Southeast region, IPRCE uses data-driven approaches focusing on topics such as transportation safety alongside other injury concerns.
