Last week I was privileged to spend several days at the Governors’ Highway Safety Association Annual Conference, in San Diego. The meeting is attended by the Highway Safety Offices of the 50 states. At the meeting, the Connecticut Department of Transportation was very kind to distribute advance copies of my new book Not So Fast to their counterparts in the other 49 states! We also provided copies to the leadership of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. My thanks to Joe Cristalli, Juliet Little and Robbin Cabelus for making the pitch to the rest of the country about Not So Fast.
GHSA covers many topics, but teen driving was among them. I will report on the highlights. First and foremost was a comment by Jeremy Amwyl, former Vice Chair of Edmunds.com, the online car dealer/retailer. He said that if it were up to him, “every GPS would be able to identify all teen drivers with red dot on the screen — and would recalculate a route around them!
More seriously, and also delving into more general traffic safety problems, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman made several pointed comments:
— if we introduced, nationwide, the so-called DADDS system (which requires drivers to blow into a tube and will not allow a car to start if alcohol is detected) we could quickly save 10,000 lives per year among the 30,000 + fatalities;
— among traffic fatalities, 50 percent involve people not wearing seatbelts, 30 percent involve alcohol, and 90 percent involve human error; she summarized these as “belts, booze and boneheads”;
— car manufacturers are quickly introducing new technologies such as crash avoidance equipment (forward collision warning devices, lane departure warnings, and electronic stability control), but we need to remember that at the current pace of automobile turnover in the U.S., the current fleet will not be fully replaced for thirty years;
— as much as possible we need to equate driving with flying; the airline industry has understood for years that pilots need a “sterile cockpit “ – no distractions, and we need to apply this mindset to driving;
— in 2011 there were an estimated 173,000 injuries from impaired driving, with 27,000 of those injuries being life-altering;
— in addressing the problem of electronic distraction, there was been widespread support for banning devices among new drivers and among commercially licensed drivers (pilots, bus drivers, train engineers, truck drivers), but when the proposals have sought to be extended to individuals adults, resistance has been widespread;
— 100 countries have adopted a 0.05 Blood Alcohol Content standard for impaired driving, but the U.S has not – we are lagging behind much of the world in this regard.
What are the takeaways from all of this for parents of teen drivers? (1) as with the adult population, if you want to concentrate on the highest risk factors first, start with seat belt use and alcohol; (2) new crash avoidance technologies are improving but are still a long way off in making a difference in crash rates; and (3) as I have advocated long and loud on this blog, parents need to act like air traffic controllers if they want to bring the right degree of oversight and supervision to their teen drivers.
