The AAA Foundation has released a new report about distracted driving, one that measures the relative distraction of hand held vs. hands free electronic devices in cars.  The study can be found at https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/MeasuringCognitiveDistractions.pdf.  The unsurprising but well documented conclusion:   not much difference in the level of distraction.  The gist of the research is that talking on a phone with someone not in the vehicle is distracting, causing what is called “cognitive blindness.”  The driver may think he or she is multi-tasking, but human awareness is more of a zero-sum game;  when a driver is engaged in conversation requiring any type of thought, it’s not multi-tasking that’s going on, but switching from one task, driving , to another, participating in the conversation.  And while drivers are conscious of the distractions when they take their eyes off the road or hands off the wheel, cognitive blindness is insidious because drivers do not comprehend that they are being distracted from the traffic situation.

I recently wrote about distracting electronics and safer teen driving in an op-ed published in the Hartford Courant last month, http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-hollister-electronic-devices-should-be-banne-20130531,0,2727873.story.   My points for parents:  First, electronic distraction of teen drivers adds to the already substantial risks they face, and a zero tolerance family policy for not only texting but use of electronics — yes, easier said than done – is essential.  Second, adults who supervise teen drivers need to consider whether they can send an effective message to teen drivers about texting and other distracting behavior when they themselves use more and more distracting elections in their own cars. Third, each state would do well to look at simplifying its electronic distraction laws, which often go on for pages and pages with definitions that try –  but fail — to keep up with evolving technology, and are laden with exceptions for things like navigation/GPS and audio, which with the array of buttons and number of steps required in many vehicles are as distracting as texting.  In my view, distraction is distraction; pushing buttons and reading screens is mind-off-the-situation, no matter what the device.  The new AAA Foundation report seems to provide empirical evidence to support this view.

Ok, that’s a bad pun in the title of this post.  Just want to get your attention.

Researchers at the George Institute for Global Health in Australia, writing in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics, report the results of a large study about teen drivers crashes and the number of hours of sleep the drivers got on average during the month prior to the crash.  They found that those who slept on average less than six hours per night were 21 percent more likely to have been in a crash.  They also found that the crash rate was 55 percent higher on weekends.

These results are consistent with studies by the AAA Foundation, which found that one in seven drivers aged 16 to 24 admitted falling asleep at the wheel in the past year, and a NHTSA study of all drivers concluding that one in six crashes with a fatality is caused by a drowsy driver.

These studies suggest several important, mandatory best practices for parents of teen drivers.  First, fatigue is the obstacle to safe driving that can hit anyone – even the most careful, well trained, well-meaning teen driver.  A high school student who is a straight A student and determined to keep his or her grades up, and will stay up late to finish a project, should not get behind the wheel the next morning.  This is a very difficult circumstance for parents to monitor and counteract, but as with all things in teen driving, the consequences of an error in a parent’s judgment are injury or death.  Next, these studies show that any teen who has gotten less than six hours of sleep on any given night should be scrutinized carefully by the supervising adult for readiness to drive, and the default parent practice — as inconvenient as it may be — is to err one side of caution and not let the teen drive.  Yes, this means the parent must do the driving.   Third, the most stunning statistic in these studies is that parents need to be on full alert for fatigue on the weekends.  Lastly, needless, to say, high caffeine energy drinks are not the answer.

Getting teens to stop texting involves not just warnings but creative and memorable ways to get teens focused on the problem  (that is, use social media!).  I highly recommend a new campaign prepared and promoted by the folks at Impact Teen Drivers in California, www.impactteendrivers.org.  The program is ”Be Thumbody,”  which is explained at www.bethumbody.com.  This campaign is for people with a bit of artistic talent, so I’m out …, but I encourage everyone else to follow the link, learn, marvel at the creativity, and get involved with this cool program.

I’ve been at this blog for nearly four years, posting articles and photos.  A few weeks ago, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center approached my family about making a video about Reid’s story, for teen drivers and their parents.  The link, released today, is below.  Now I have a short video that masterfully tells the story and conveys the central messages.  Our family’s thanks to Kevin Borrup of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Paula Fahy Ostop and her colleagues at Go-Media for their great work, and to Kohl’s for their financial support.

A friend of mine, a mother of four boys, sent along this article from a newspaper in Marshfield, Massachusetts, where she grew up.  It was written by the Police Chief of Marshfield, and provides an eloquent and powerful reminder of the consequences of bad teen driver decisions and the need for vigilance among parents and supervising adults as we enter prom season and the four most dangerous months of the year for young drivers.

PHILLIP TAVARES: Dreading the knock on the door late at night

Last Wednesday, May 8, I had the privilege to attend the U.S. launch of Global Youth Traffic Safety Month, organized by the National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS).  An inspirational day it was, on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial (with weather that threatened but at the last minute cooperated):  remarks from US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland, Dr. Tom Frieden of the Center for Disease Control, Chairman Debra Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board, and former Secretary of Transportation (and current President of the Road Safety Foundation)  Norman Mineta.  Each speaker put the more than 34,000 annual deaths on American roads in the context of the 1.2 million lives that are lost around the world each year in traffic crashes.  Each speaker emphasized the preventability of crashes and the incalculable loss of life, but noted that twenty years ago, the cause of getting the American public to wear seat belts seemed like a daunting and uphill battle, but we have made great strides there and we can do the same with crashes, injuries, and fatalities.  Their remarks were overhung by an air of urgency, based on the fact, announced two days before the event, that traffic fatalities in the U.S. rose in 2012 over 2011 after several years of decline.

After the Jefferson Memorial event, about two hundred of us participated in a Long Short Walk, which I have written about in recent posts.  Recall that the Long Short Walk originated with the family on Nelson Mandela, whose great granddaughter Zenani , a pedestrian, was killed in a crash in South Africa in 2010.  At the event and on the walk we were joined by Kweku Mandela, Nelson’s grandson and Zenani’s cousin.

Below are photos of me with Secretary Mineta and with Kweku Mandela.  It was an honor to meet them and to be inspired by their efforts to make our roads safer throughout the world.

As explained here a few weeks ago, the Road Safety Foundation has been organizing an international traffic and pedestrian safety campaign called The Long Short Walk.  The campaign originated with the family of Nelson Mandela, whose great granddaughter was killed in a crash in 2010.  (Mandela’s memoir is called The Long Short Walk To Freedom, hence the campaign name.) On the weekend of April 27-28, the extended Hollister family, in three separate runs/walks, was proud to join in this worthy event, captured in these photos (click on them to display them in full-screen):

Today, another interesting topic from the recent Lifesavers Conference.

Presenter Pam Fischer, who has been active in safe teen driving in New Jersey and nationally for 30 years, presented a chart that compared the top five things that, according to surveys, parents worry about when it comes to their children, as compared to the actual top five causes of injuries and fatalities:

What Parents Most Worry About

1. Kidnapping
2. Sniper Attack
3. Terrorism
4. Predators/Strangers
5. Drug Abuse

Causes Of Death For Teens And Children

1. Car Crashes
2. Homicide
3. Child Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning

This list in itself was dramatic enough, but as a matter of fact, Pam presented this list on Monday morning April 14, and then that afternoon, as the Lifesavers Conference attendees were at the annual NHTSA awards luncheon, the news of the Boston Marathon bombings started appearing on cell phones throughout the auditorium.  In other words, that afternoon, Number 3 on the parent’s worry list probably escalated to Number 1.

The point of the lists, of course, was to illustrate that parents appear to worry more for their children about unknown and uncontrollable causes than they do about things that, although more often the cause of injury or death, are more commonplace, more familiar, more expected, and perhaps more within their control. Also, I do not know the exact question that was posed to parents to elicit these lists, or how the words “What do you most worry about?” were conveyed.  In any event, the take-away from the chart and Pam Fischer’s remarks was clear:  parents worry less about the safety of their teen drivers than they do about unknown and unpredictable causes of injury or death.  I doubt that anyone who works in traffic safety is surprised by this, but it does shed an interesting light on the continuing problem of how we get parents to pay more attention to the safety risks of teen driving.  The lists reinforce the idea that teen driving crashes are such a regular occurrence that we are not wholly surprised, and therefore less attentive to them than we should be.

Another nugget of wisdom from the Lifesavers Conference: The dangers of teen drivers having passengers, especially other teens or siblings, are well documented.  For teen drivers, any passenger who is not a supervising adult driver is a potential distraction, and the distraction outweighs any “another pair of eyes” safety benefit.

But with the acknowledgement that the following does NOT apply to teens, one speaker at Lifesavers explained why talking to a passenger is less distracting than talking to someone on a cellphone.  First, a passenger who is an experienced driver actually can provide some modest benefit as an extra pair of eyes on the road.  Second, a passenger knows when to stop talking, because he or she can see when the driving situation requires the driver’s full attention, which someone on a cellphone cannot.  Third, studies have now shown that it is more cognitively challenging to talk to someone who is not in the car than it is to a passenger.  In other words, a driver and a passenger talking are “in sync” as to the driving situation, but a driver and a cellphone caller are not.  A caller has no idea when the driver needs to switch attention back to the traffic situation, and might in fact say something that requires careful thought — cognitive distraction — at just the wrong time.

So, for teen drivers, any passenger is a distraction, and for experienced drivers, talking on a cellphone is more distracting than talking to a passenger.   Thus, anyone who says that “if I can talk to a passenger, I can talk on a cell phone” is off the mark.

This past weekend I attended the Lifesavers Conference, the annual meeting of the national traffic safety community.  My next few posts will report on a variety of things I learned there (in Denver, in the snow).

There have been some studies and reports about teens delaying getting licensed until age 18, to avoid the restrictions and requirements of Graduated Driver Licensing laws, and some evidence of crash rates for 18 and 19 year olds going up as a result.  A session led by Bruce Hamilton of the AAA Foundation and Scott Masten of the California DMV shed some light on this topic.

In summary, the current research, which admittedly is not comprehensive or definitive but indicative, shows the following:  First, in states with the strictest GDL systems, there is some evidence that if teens do not become licensed at 16, they wait until they are 18 or older.  This was evident in Scott Masten’s data for California, which has a relatively strict GDL system; the data showed a large number of 16 year olds obtaining their licenses, but then a marked drop off among 17 year olds, followed by a surge among the 18 year olds.  Second, an important safety issue:  crash rates for 18 and 19 year olds who got their licenses without going thorough the GDL restrictions for drivers under 18 had higher crash rates for the first 36 months of licensing that younger drivers who had been through the GDL restrictions.  The important take-away from this (again, data from one state only) is that one of the key benefits of GDL is that the prohibitions and restrictions on new drivers that GDL imposes allow them to get on-the-road experience in less dangerous situations — with passengers, night driving, etc. — before moving on to an unrestricted license.  This information, if documented in more states, would seem to be a powerful argument for extending GDL restrictions to 18 and 19 year olds at least.

The third point from Bruce and Scott’s presentations was that this phenomenon of teens delaying licensing is a relative non-issue in states with lenient GDL systems.  In other words, if state law allow teens to obtain a learner’s permit at age 14 or 15 (as 39 states do) and a license with few restrictions at 16, waiting  until age 18 is much less of an issue.  In these states, delaying licensing to age 18 or 19 or later is an issue of finances, location, or family situation.  Teens who can’t afford to drive don’t do so until they have a job/income; teens in urban areas have less need for cars; and sometimes a family’s situation or a teen’s physical and mental development simply dictate that they are not ready to drive.