Jackie was on her way to a doctor’s appointment last fall when she realized her Uber driver’s eyes were not fully on the road. “He had a video playing on his phone and was intermittently looking at it,” she said. Jackie, who is 32 and lives in New Jersey, could not tell exactly what the driver was watching, but she remembers seeing shots of people talking – she guessed it was a video podcast. “I was definitely feeling a lot of dread and distress.”

As they continued on their 40-minute drive down the New Jersey Turnpike – a hectic highway that is not easy driving – Jackie considered saying something. But she felt vulnerable as a rider. “I was alone in a car with someone who was already doing something I found shocking and reckless,” she said. “I didn’t know how they were going to react.”

Jackie, a publicist who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, made it to her appointment safely, but the experience rattled her. And it happened again just hours later.

Since cellphones became ubiquitous, drivers have been texting behind the wheel, leading to awareness about “distracted driving”. Slogans such as “It can wait” or “Arrive alive, don’t text and drive” are blazed on highway billboards across the country, and 49 states and Washington DC have instated laws against it. (Montana is the one holdout.) But experts – and plenty of drivers, passengers and pedestrians – have clocked a new culprit: people watching videos, such as YouTube or TikTok, while driving.

Earlier this month, a driver slammed into a parked police cruiser on a highway in Redwood City, California, narrowly missing an officer, who footage caught jumping out of the way just in time. The driver said he was watching videos on YouTube and failed to notice the scene ahead of him. “We see people reading, watching videos, watching a football game,” a spokesperson for the California highway patrol told the San Francisco Chronicle, warning drivers to “stay focused behind the wheel”.

Fatalities from car crashes decreased after the introduction of seatbelt laws and airbags in the 1970s, but ticked back up after the Covid pandemic. Experts cited a bevy of reasons: larger cars, higher speed limits, the opioid crisis and smartphones. The most recent data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed that 3,275 people were killed due to distracted driving in 2023, and more than 300,000 were injured. That statistic does not break down how drivers were distracted.

“People are engaging more and more with their phones [while driving],” said Charlie Klauer, a research scientist and associate professor at Virginia Tech who studies the effects of driving while distracted or fatigued. “The progression has gone from texting to browsing and looking and watching, which we now see a lot of. It’s Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and a wide range of things.”

New drivers, which the NHTSA categorizes as between the ages of 15 and 20, made up the largest proportion of drivers who were distracted at the time of a fatal car crash. Klauer says she sees distracted driving “across the board” in her research, but “it’s through the early to mid-20s that we see very high prevalence of this type of behavior.”

Joel Feldman became a speaker and advocate against distracted driving after his daughter Casey’s death from an accident in 2009. He hosts school assemblies to remind middle and high school students about the dangers of not paying attention on the road. “I talk to kids, and they’ll say that they take a quick look at a TikTok video” while behind the wheel, he said. “I didn’t hear that five years ago. It comes up whether I’m giving talks in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado or Maryland, and those are just the ones I’ve been to in the last few weeks.”

And then there are the people making, not watching, videos behind the wheel. In November, a 43-year-old woman hit and killed a man while allegedly livestreaming from her car. Viewers reported hearing a loud thud, the cry of a child in the backseat, and the woman saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck … I just hit somebody.” A month later, the popular Twitch streamer Jalen Melton (username: MeltIsLIVE) collided with another car in Atlanta while seeming to livestream. No one was critically hurt, police said. Twitch deactivated Melton’s account after the crash.

Drivers sometimes keep their phones in a holder attached to the windshield or dash so they can easily peek at the screen, presumably thinking there’s nothing wrong with this set-up. Klauer emphatically disagrees. “There’s a concern I have that the public believes that hands-free is safe, but anything that causes you to take your eyes off the roadway increases risk significantly.” Klauer cited the “two-second rule”: the odds of getting in a car crash double if you take your eyes off the road for more than two seconds.

This behavior lies in a legal limbo. Thirty-three states prohibit drivers from using handheld devices behind the wheel, but many of these laws were written before the rise of streaming. They don’t account for the fact that drivers can buy a $70 firestick on Amazon that allows them to watch streamers such as Netflix, YouTube and Tubi, for instance. States such as Connecticut and Virginia currently have bills that would outlaw streaming or livestreaming from the driver’s seat. “How is this not already a law?” one local Connecticut TV reporter asked.

Ironically, carmakers have made screen displays ubiquitous, to the chagrin of many drivers who hate the tech; it’s cheaper to install a touchscreen than rows of buttons. Last year, a study found that car infotainment systems generated 42.6 complaints for every 100 vehicles – more than any other vehicle system. Some manufacturers have gone back to the old way: Hyundai, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and Subaru announced they will bring back buttons to 2026 models.

Still, 97% of car models released after 2023 have some sort of touchscreen, where drivers can view maps, browse streaming libraries and check calendars. In 2021, Tesla stopped allowing drivers to play video games on its center consoles, after facing pressure from auto regulators. Car safety assessment programs in New Zealand, Australia and Europe discourage touchscreens, especially for essential actions such as turning on the headlights, honking the horn or windshield wipers, as screens require looking away from the road. And a 2020 UK study found that using Apple CarPlay and Android Auto infotainment screens weakened drivers’ reaction more than alcohol or cannabis use.

“We’re definitely seeing increased risk with the touchscreen itself,” Klauer said. “Whether that touchscreen increases the prevalence of watching videos and movies, one might think so, but I don’t have any data to actually say that’s true.”

On her way back from the doctor’s appointment, Jackie once again found herself in a rideshare with a driver who was watching something on his phone. She filed a complaint with Uber, and received an email from the company saying they would never pair her with him again. A spokesperson for Uber wrote in an email to the Guardian that drivers are responsible for knowing and obeying the laws and rules of the road, including local laws addressing distracted driving.

“I want more awareness put on this,” Jackie said. “The fact that it happened twice shows that it’s a problem.”