Despite all the warnings about the dangers of talking or texting while driving, a new study suggests that the situation is getting progressively worse.

Cellphone use is now estimated to be involved in 26% of all motor vehicle crashes — up from 25% last year, according to “Injury Facts,” the annual survey from the National Safety Council released Tuesday. But it’s not texting or checking status updates — widely regarded as the scourge of road accidents — that’s the biggest problem. Around 5% of cellphone-related crashes involve texting, while the other 21% involve drivers talking on hand-held or hands-free cellphones, the survey found.

“Intuitively, texting has more elements of distraction because you’re looking away from the road, but people are more comfortable talking on the phone and probably do it more often,” says Kara Macek, communications director at the Governors Highway Safety Association, a non-profit association in Washington, D.C. representing state highway safety offices across the country. “We suspect a lot of this data is also underreported simply because people will not own up to the fact that they were distracted and caused a crashed.”

Drivers using cellphones fail to see up to 50% of the information in their environment, according to David Teater, senior director of transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, a non-profit organization in Itasca, Ill. And the risk of getting in crashes from texting is getting worse, he says. Texting is increasing in popularity inside and outside of the driver’s seat: One in three Americans favors texting over calling, according to a 2011 study by Pew Research Center, and Americans send an average of 41 texts a day (with those ages 19 to 25 sending an average of 110 texts a day).

Automobile crashes also have a huge economic cost. The calculable costs of motor-vehicle crashes are wage and productivity losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, motor vehicle damage, and employers’ uninsured costs, according to the National Safety Council. In 2012, one automobile fatality costs around $1.4 million, while each non-fatal disabling injury cost $79,000.

The number of drivers texting or manipulating their devices increased from 0.9% in 2010 to 1.3% in 2011, while driver hand-held cellphone use remained steady at 5%, according to a survey carried out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. One possible reason: Lack of enforcement. Drunken driving carries heavy fines and jail time, experts say, but cellphone violations are treated more leniently. “It’s on our most-wanted list of transportation-safety improvements,” says Terry Williams, a spokesman for the NTSB.

There are federal bans prohibiting train engineers and drivers, as well as commercial truck and bus drivers, from using cellphones, but there are still no federal ban on car drivers. Some 12 states and the District of Columbia have bans on hand-held cellphone use — including New York, New Jersey, California and Oregon — and 42 states and D.C. explicitly ban texting (Washington was the first state to ban texting in 2007). New York state was one of the first to pass a hand-held ban in 2001. No state bans all cellphone use for all drivers, but 37 states and D.C. ban all cellphone use by novice drivers, while 20 states and D.C. prohibit it among school bus drivers.

Safety experts advocate a federal ban on all cellphone use while driving — including the use of hands-free devices. Such devices allow drivers to keep both hands on the steering wheel, but they don’t prevent calls from being distracting, studies show. Driving while using a cellphone reduces brain activity associated with driving — “spatial processing” that helps them remember and make sense of the objects they observe on the street — by 37%, according to one 2008 research paper by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The bans on cellphone use in commercial vehicles came after a series of crashes involving cellphones. After a tugboat and barge collided with a passenger vessel on July 7, 2010, in the Delaware River, killing two tourists, the NTSB cited the tugboat driver’s use of his cellphone and company laptop as contributors to the incident. On March 26, 2010, a Freightliner truck-tractor crossed lanes and collided with a van, and caught fire. Nine van passengers died. The NTSB again identified distracting cellphone use by the driver as a cause. Last year, the driver of the train that derailed in Spain, killing 79 people and injuring many others, was talking on his cellphone; the train was moving 119 mph at the time — more than twice the recommended speed on that stretch, according to the court.

And in 2008, when a Los Angeles Metrolink train collided with a Union Pacific freight train, killing 25 people, the NTSB notes, the engineer driving the commuter train had sent a text about 22 seconds before the crash. “Distracted from his duties, he did not stop the train and collided head-on with the approaching freight train,” the report said. Worse, the engineer had a history of using his cellphone for personal communications while on duty, it said. As a direct result, the Federal Railroad Administration banned rail employees from using cellphones and electronic devices on the job.

This story is updated from a previous version.

Other articles by Quentin Fottrell:

Fatal train crash a wake-up call to all drivers

5 ways commuting is ruining your life

Car technology’s biggest failure