This post provides several national updates about safe teen driving:
- Writer Sharon Silke Carty of the Huffington Post /Autos@aol.com continues her excellent series about teen driving. If you have not visited, I highly recommend it. Her most recent article is http://autos.aol.com/article/teen-driving-safety-teens-speak-up-about-driving-texting-pare/.
- The National Organizations for Youth Safety, www.noys.org, will host a national distracted driving summit for teens today and tomorrow (which I will be attending). They are expecting more than 200 people and will have several panels of experts talking with teens about ways to combat this growing problem.
- The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, http://www.aaafoundation.org/home/, has released a new study demonstrating that teen driver crash rates are 50 percent higher in the first month that teens begin to drive unsupervised by a parent of instructor than after a year of driving. Reporter Tom Costello of NBC did a segment on this research last Friday, October 14, on the Today Show, and concluded that with teen drivers, “There is simply no substitute for experience.”
- In 2008, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to mandate that teens in the learner’s permit phase be accompanied to a two hour class by a parent or guardian. Despite the usual and expected initial complaints from some parents about imposition on their busy schedules, now that the class is established, it has been overwhelmingly received positive reviews from parents. Connecticut is now taking the first step in the next phase, which is standardizing what the driving schools and driver education teachers are teaching the parents during this class, hoping to make sure that the messages are accurate, compelling, and mostly uniform. I am involved with this effort and will report further as the effort progresses.
