On December 2, 2006, my seventeen-year-old son, Reid, the driver, died in a one-car accident. On a three-lane Interstate highway that he probably never had driven before, on a dark night just after rain had stopped, and apparently traveling above the speed limit, he went too far into a curve before turning, then overcorrected, and went into a spin. While the physics of the moment could have resulted in any number of trajectories, his car hit the point of a guardrail precisely at the middle of the driver's-side door, which crushed the left-side of his chest.

• Safer teen driving starts with informed, conservative decisions about whether teens get behind the wheel of a car in the first place. Teaching teens to operate a vehicle safely is Step 2.
  
  
• Driving is the leading cause of death for people under age 20 in the United States.
  
  
• Safer teen driving is everyone's concern. In 2010, nearly 2,000 teen drivers died, but their crashes killed more than 3,000 passengers, other drivers, and pedestrians.

Father of Reid S. Hollister, age 17, a driver, who died in the early morning of December 2, 2006, the result of a one-car accident on the evening of December 1, at Exit 34 on Interstate 84 East in Plainville, Connecticut.

I hope the past few blog posts have encouraged you to find a copy of Tom Vanderbilt's book Traffic. The number of insights it offers into traffic safety is breathtaking. Once again let me spotlight a seemingly simple Vanderbilt observation that, ...