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1. 

   John on February 23, 2010 at 4:44 pm

   Tim,

   I’ve just completed watching your presentation for the second time and I would like to give you some honest feedback from my perspective. Our goals are the same and I pray you don’t take offense to anything I write.

   First of all, I’ve read and watched many dissertations from parents who have lost children and there is a pattern of how they try to solve the problem. Your presentation was very well done however, it falls into the same pattern.

   What is missing? There is an assumption that government task forces, driving instructors, police officers, and parents are fully informed and knowledgeable about safe driving practices and the problem is just finding a way to get it through to the teenage brain. Nothing could be further from the truth.

   When I ask people to rate their own driving ability on a scale of 1 to 100, most drivers (including parents, police officers, task force experts, and driving instructors) rate themselves somewhere between 90 and 100, usually 95 to 97. From my perspective, most people fall somewhere between 30 and 50.

   Please don’t think for one second that I’m being cocky or arrogant because that’s not my personality. I have studied this subject for 26 years and I’ve learned a great deal about solving this problem.

   The biggest hurdle to solving this dysfunctional driving death dilemma is convincing the people (who believe they know how to solve the problem) that they don’t know how to solve the problem……

   “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

   People assume they know most everything there is to know about teaching teenagers how to drive just because they possess a driver’s license. I find it interesting that when the teenage death statistics are put forth (6200+ each year), they omit the 38,000+ death statistics that are caused by adult drivers…..the same adult drivers that are charged with training our youth to drive.

   So to put this in perspective, the group with the most traffic fatalities (adults) are training the group with the least traffic fatalities (teenagers). I know the percentages are higher per teen driver but the fact remains, most of the accidents are caused by adults.

   The truth of the matter is that most parents are not effective driver trainers for their teenagers, they’ve never been taught how to teach the skill of driving. Most States have a requirement that a teen spend 6 hours with a driving instructor and then a minimum of 50 hours with a parent, a parent with their own bad driving habits, and a parent without the necessary knowledge to create a safe teen driver. I’ve actually had parents tell me that they’re too afraid to get in the car with their own teen……they just want their teen to pass the driving test so they can finish learning to drive on their own.

   In your presentation, you mentioned something similar. “The Volvo shudders at the sound of her key chain” indicates that the parents know their daughter isn’t a fully competent driver but they still allow their daughter to go out on the road with the rest of us. If the parents knew how to effectively teach their daughter to drive, the Volvo wouldn’t shudder. Sounds like the parents were the ones shuddering. The fact that the parents have a driver’s license doesn’t solve the problem.

   I do agree that the blood and guts don’t help teach teens anything. Imagine learning how to fly an airplane and most of the movies in ground school were of airplane crashes. Wouldn’t work for me. I also agree that groups like IMPACT get the teens to open their mind but sad stories don’t teach them to be better drivers (advanced driving concepts do).

   You also stated that parents should learn State driving laws and drive lots of hours, I agree. However, I don’t agree with the skid schools (increases dopamine and serotonin levels) because it gives them almost a tacit invitation to practice what they learned (on a closed-course track) out on the public streets. Additionally, the skid schools spend their time teaching what to do to get out of a dangerous driving situation instead of teaching the teen driver not to get into the dangerous situation in the first place (pro-active vs reactive).

   I also disagree with the use of simulators as they’ve been proven to promote tunnel vision, (exceptions are the 180 degree wrap-around simulators).

   The simple solution? Make the driving exam 60 to 90 minutes long and make it a real difficult test to pass. I was talking with my colleague today about this e-mail I was going to write to you. He mentioned if the behind-the-wheel driving exam was as difficult to pass as the grueling test to become a fireman, the competency of teen drivers would skyrocket. We likened the current behind-the-wheel driving exam to that of a fireman having to put out a small campfire with a garden hose as his fireman’s exam.

   A grueling drive test should include multiple freeway on-ramps & off-ramps, all right-of-way situations, every kind of intersection, perpendicular, diagonal, and parallel parking, curvy mountain roads, lane changes in multiple situations…….make it an extremely difficult test.

   An extremely long and difficult test would force parents to learn more about how to train their teenager and it would force the driving instructors to become experts instead of training by osmosis.

   Instead, we currently have namby-pamby testing requirements which feeds our current dysfunctional driving death dilemma. This driving death dilemma has gone on for way too long and I want to do something to correct it. I recently read that in 1930, almost 40,000 people were killed in auto accidents. Eighty years of over 40,000 driving deaths each year? I call that insanity.

   I’m just finishing up my book and as soon as it’s done, I’ll send you a copy. I believe it has many of the answers you may be looking for.

   Thanks for listening,

   John

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