One of the themes I have tried to develop on this blog is how the national public safety crisis of teen driver crashes, fatalities, and injuries is largely hidden from our view, for two reasons: crashes are so common that they are almost always reported as local news only, a paragraph in the regional or local news or police blotter section of our newspapers; and unless we know the people involved in the crash, we hardly give crashes a second thought — they are the price of our mobile society, an unavoidable fact of life in our automobile-dependent society. We don’t see or understand the big picture.
So, let me heap praise on the National Safety Council’s Drive It Home website (launched several months ago), both because of its overall quality and specifically a feature called “Today’s Teen Driving Headlines,” a compilation of news stories from across the country involving teen driver crashes. A few years ago, Safe Roads for Teens, part of Advocates for Highway Safety, collected these headlines as part of their advocacy for what became the federal teen driving legislation known as MAP 21, but then this valuable service disappeared until NSC resurrected it on their new website. The link is http://www.driveithome.org/Pages/home.aspx?utm_medium=banner&utm_source=nsc-web&utm_campaign=comm2013. The headlines are the box at lower right.
Simply put, there is nothing else that I know of that describes so well the cumulative pain and society-wide impact of teen driving than this compilation of the daily headlines. Reading them is nothing less than searing: teen driver kills sibling, teen driver kills parent, 15 year old driving illegally kills himself and others — on and on and on and on and on. Our accumulated national anguish with teen driving, all in one easily accessible place. I strongly encourage parents to post the link above as a browser favorite and check it out every few days, to get a true sense of how teen driver crashes impact our society — not as aggregate statistics or isolated stories, but through a day by day recounting of the real-life, real-time, national impact of crashes and how they destroy lives and communities.
