Wednesday, October 21, 2015

National Teen Driver Safety Week

Image courtesy of studentdriverproducts.com
This week is National Teen Driver Safety Week. Even in this day and age of greatly improved safety devices in cars, crashes are still the top killer of people 15 to 20 years of age. Progress has slowly been made as states update their licensing requirements (to varying degrees of effectiveness), but there are still tremendous gaps in many states and there is always more that can be done to help improve the situation. A few stories shared on Jalopnik about driver's education experiences really show just how far we still have to go. Take this story, for example:

"In Virginia the driving section was done through a private company which charged hundreds of dollars for (mandated by law) five sessions and a test at the end. The owner of the school picked me up on day one and we drove around for a half hour then took me home. He handed me a signed paper and said, “It’s been nice getting to know you over the past five days, good luck to you.”

I crashed my car a week later."

Such stories are probably more common than we think. Young drivers who fail to receive adequate training to handle some of the more unexpected and challenging situations are certainly contributors towards the crash statistics so Michelin, in the spirit of improving driver education, has asked more experienced drivers to share their safety tips with those less experienced. Finding a way to share our collective wisdom to improve the safety of all on the road is a great start towards making a difference in the education process, but it is no substitute for significantly more stringent driver education standards. If you have wisdom to share, simply tag it with #SharingSafety. You can also check out our own Driving 101 collection of posts for some of our tips.

The longer term implications of better teen drivers now is better adult drivers in the future. That is a worthy investment, if there ever was one.

To learn more about National Teen Driver Safety Week, visit the Governors Highway Safety Association for more details.

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