For several years, the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, with assistance from various non-profits organizations and sponsors (this year, Travelers), has conducted a statewide video contest for high school students, on safe driving. The specific topic this year was distracted driving and texting. The text and link below to this year’s top ten videos come from my friend Bill Seymour of the Connecticut DMV. It only takes about five minutes to scroll through these 30 second videos.

Two years ago, when my daughter Martha was a member of the DMV’s Safe Teen Driving Advisory Committee, I got to watch more than 100 entries. A neat experience.

These videos should give us hope for the future. Not only do they show that there are teens out there who are passionate about the causes of safe teen driving and stopping texting and distracted driving, but they show that Connecticut may be a hotbed of future movie-making talent!

In the interest of full disclosure, the video production class at Cheney Tech, led by advisor Ken Simon and student Bailey Norman, invited me to be the spokesperson for one of the three videos they produced. One of their entries - not the one I appeared in!- made the top ten. Ken and Cheney Tech students - congratulations and good work!

As the DMV’s announcement notes, the winners have been selected and will be announced on April 4th, so I guess it’s OK for me (I am writing this the day before the Oscars, so I guess we’re all in this mode) to express my choice: I think the winner will emerge from the one about abbreviations, the one in which the teen driver’s conscience is sitting in the back seat, or the one in which cell phones are the cars.

Enjoy, and to all of the participants and winners: you are saving lives.

The DMV release:

Student Directors and Your Accompanying Videographers and Actors — Thank you for your submissions to the 2010-2011 DMV teen safe driving video contest, From the Driver’s Seat to the Director’s Chair. We received more than 160 entries and it was very difficult to choose among them. Each had special messages and ways of presenting the safety messages. More than 20 judges, including Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, met in Hartford today to discuss videos and also review the Top 10 finalists who were selected by 24 other judges statewide. The judges who gather today also selected the top three winners. Those names will be announced April 4 at the special awards ceremony hosted by our chief prize sponsor, Travelers Companies.

You can see the Top 10 videos on the DMV Center for Teen Safe Driving Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/DMV-Center-for-Teen-Safe-Driving/161570093887045 or by going to http://ct.gov/teendriving and choosing the Facebook link there.

In 2008, Connecticut’s Safe Teen Driving Task Force recommended that 16 and 17 year-old-drivers be prohibited from carrying passengers other than an adult supervising driver for their first six months with a license, and from carrying anyone other than immediate family members for months six through twelve. In other words, parents, brothers, and sisters after six months, but no friends for one year. This change merely represented a doubling of our state’s prior passenger restrictions (previously three months - three months), so it was modest and incremental. I don’t recall any particular reason for the difference between immediate family members and everyone else other than the prior law included this distinction, so all we did was lengthen the time periods.

Last week, the traffic safety and safe teen driving communities here got word that a state legislator had proposed a bill “to allow newly-licensed teen drivers to carry siblings as passengers.” We did some checking and learned that the bill had been proposed by one legislator as a favor to one constituent who thought that the issue deserved a public discussion. The bill was scheduled for a hearing, and suddenly many of us had to mobilize against it, lest our silence lead the Transportation Committee members to think the change was acceptable. With help from several professionals, including studies obtained from Mario Damiata of NHTSA’s Region 1 office, we assembled written testimony pointing out why allowing newly-licensed teen drivers to have siblings as passengers is dangerous and bad public policy. I offer it to anyone else who may need to oppose a similar legislative proposal:

Connecticut General Assembly, Transportation Committee Testimony,

February 14, 2011, opposing House Bill 6122

We strongly oppose H.B. 6122, which would “allow newly-licensed drivers to carry siblings as passengers,” for these reasons:

1. Study after study during the past decade has documented beyond argument that crash rates of newly-licensed teen drivers increase significantly when they have one or more passengers other than a supervising adult driver. Three such studies are attached: (a) a 2009 study by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety; (b) a 2007 study by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which specifically addresses the risks of siblings as passengers; and (c) a recent Fact Sheet prepared by Advocates for Auto and Highway Safety, which is a proponent of federal legislation known as the Safe Teen and Novice Driver Uniform Protection (STANDUP) Act, which seeks to encourage states to adopt longer passenger restrictions than Connecticut’s current law.

   
   

   These are recent, national, well-documented studies by the nation’s leading traffic safety organizations, and they show H.B. 6122 as directly contrary to existing evidence regarding teen driver safety.




2. H.B. 6122 reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the dangers of teen driving. The bill appears to assume that a teenager who is duly-licensed by the State of Connecticut is a safe driver. This is simply not the case, for at least three reasons: (a) the brains of teenagers suffer from a chemical imbalance that encourages risk-taking and discourages caution, and this condition does not dissipate until ages 22 to 25; (b) it takes three to five years of experience to create a safe driver, which is far more than the mere 40 hours that Connecticut requires for a license; and (c) we train new drivers on streets in their hometowns, but then they routinely drive in places they have never been before, so they are learning to handle a vehicle and navigate at the same time – a daunting challenge even for experienced drivers. Our age-of-licensing laws, unfortunately, are based more on tradition than science or traffic safety facts. Allowing siblings as passengers of newly-licensed teen drivers is guaranteed to increase crash rates and put both teen drivers and their siblings at risk.




3. H.B. 6122 proposes to repeal the recommendation on this exact subject of the 2007-08 Task Force, which spent considerable time on it, with help of national experts and NHTSA. The Task Force’s recommendation to lengthen passenger restrictions by prohibiting siblings as passengers for the first six months of licensure was a modest amendment that should not be changed without compelling evidence; as noted, the current evidence warrants, if anything, even longer restrictions on passengers and siblings than were adopted in 2008. Rolling back these provisions is simply unwarranted.

It appears that underlying H.B. 6122 is convenience for parents, a desire to help busy mothers and fathers with transporting their kids to school and events. It may be that Committee members have received calls from parents who would like to change our teen driving laws to accommodate their schedules. We can acknowledge the realities that parents are busy and much of our society is automobile-dependent, but our teen driving laws should not put convenience ahead of safety. Driving remains the leading cause of death of people under age 20 in the United States. H.B. 6122 does not reflect an accurate understanding of the dangers of teen driving, and we encourage the Transportation Committee to reject it.

In prior posts on this blog and in my presentations, the starting point for my advice to parents of teen drivers has been: ”Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a safe teen driver,” and I have listed three reasons. First, the brains of teenagers have a chemical imbalance that invites risk taking and diminishes caution, and this condition does not equalize until a person reaches age 22 to 25. Second, becoming a safe driver – mastering the 1,500 or so skills that it takes to handle a vehicle in the wide variety of situations drivers face, and anticipating problems while crashes can still be avoided – takes three to five years, not the 20-50-100 hours our laws require of teens before they get their licenses. Third, we teach teens to drive on local roads, but then we turn them loose to drive in places they have never been before, so they are learning to drive and navigate at the same time – a daunting challenge even for adults. Thus, teen drivers are inherently unsafe because none of these characteristics can be overcome by training, lectures, or well-intentioned parents; safe driving takes years of time and experience for which there is no shortcut.

Being a responsible blogger, I try to read everything I can get my hands on that is relevant to my topic, and I have now read enough to conclude that there is a fourth reason, a characteristic of teen drivers that makes them dangerous and cannot be overcome in a short period of time with just instruction and encouragement: teen drivers invariably look at the front of the car and the road immediately ahead of them, but not far enough ahead to see trouble coming.

I found this best described in two books. The first is Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt (Vintage 2009). (A brilliant book, by the way.) Vanderbilt says:

Researchers have long known that inexperienced drivers have much different “visual search patterns” than more experienced drivers. They tend to look overwhelmingly near the front of the car and at the edge markings of the road. They tend not to look at the external mirrors very often, even while doing things like changing lanes. Knowing where to look – and remembering what you have seen – is a hallmark of experience and expertise.

The second book is Empowering Parent To Teach Crash-Proof Driving (Elite Driver Publishing 2010), by John Cullington of California (who has been very kind in commenting occasionally on my blog posts). Cullington makes a series of disarmingly insightful points, such as “When your eyes are up, you are able to see down but when you look down, you are unable to see up.” Therefore, because teen drivers focus on the front of the car and the road just ahead of them, they are less able to see things above them like traffic lights, and ahead of them like cars that are stopped, approaching, or coming from a side road. Cullington further explains that “Fixated attention on objects greatly enhances the chances that a driver will have a collision.” He continues: ”When I present this concept I always ask the question, ‘Do your hands follow your eyes?’ About half my clients say ‘yes’ but it still surprises me that the other half aren’t sure about their answer.” Putting the problem another way, Cullington explains that student drivers watch out “for all of the objects that they don’t want to hit with their vehicle,” but little else.

So, I must add “deficient visual patterns” as the fourth reason why there is no such thing as a safe teen driver; why being old enough to obtain a license plus taking Driver’s Ed does not a safe driver make; why supervision of teen drivers is a daily responsibility, not a one-time challenge.

As if we needed a fourth reason.