Last month I was invited by the National Organizations for Youth Safety (www.noys.org) to participate in a four minute public service video on teen driving. The main purpose of the video is to promote NOYS’s safe teen driving website for parents, UnderYourInfluence, found at www.underyourinfluence.org. NOYS has kindly promoted this blog on this website twice in the past several months. The video will be launched on national TV this Thursday, May 26th. The first two broadcasts will be:

• the WE Network (in greater Hartford on Comcast, Channel 117) on Thursday May 26 at 7AM; and
• the Food Network, on Monday June 6th at 7:30 AM

I will post the schedule for other broadcasts as I learn of them. After the May 26 broadcast, the video will also be available at www.betterlivingtelevision.com, under “Everyday Parenting.”

The other parent in the video is Laura Marchetti of Tampa, Florida. The parallels in our lives are eerie. Her daughter Katie was eleven days younger than Reid and, like Reid, died in a one car crash on an interstate highway on a Friday night in December. The Marchettis have a son who is the same age as my daughter Martha. Laura’s husband Vince, like me, is a land use lawyer. Finally, both Laura and Vince have roots in New England. The Marchetti family has done incredible work on seat belt legislation in Florida and has set up the Katie Marchetti Foundation, www.katiesstory.com, which promotes and supports a variety of traffic safety initiatives. For me, meeting Laura and Vince in Florida at the taping session was nothing less than life-affirming; they are dedicated, articulate, compassionate people who have turned tragedy into public service in ways that are simply inspiring.

Hope you like the video.

Many of the statistics that government and non-profit agencies provide about safe driving in general and teen driving in particular confirm things we highly suspect or seem to know intuitively, and so it is with alarming new data issued last week at the launch of the Decade of Action for Road Safety: Twice as many teens die on the roads during the summer months as during the rest of the year.

The traffic safety agencies reviewed fatality reports for the past several years and found these sobering statistics:

• From May through August, fatalities in crashes involving teen drivers average nearly 16 per day, as compared to just under nine per day during the other eight months;
• Six of the top seven deadliest days of the year occur in May through August; and
• On the single deadliest day of the year, May 23, the average number of deaths, 25, is three times the level of the least deadly (we can’t say “safest”) day, which is just above eight.

So, parents, it is now May 17. The four deadliest months of the year lie ahead.

Figuring out why there are more fatalities in the summer months is not difficult. It is as simple as the difference between purposeful and recreational driving, as pointed out in my October 8, 2009 post. When teens have a destination, a route, a timetable, and a consequence for not arriving on time, they are far more likely to arrive safely than when they are “joyriding,” that is, driving for fun. Guess what type of driving increases substantially during the summer months? Finally, May 23 is the plainly the most dangerous day of the year because it is smack in the middle of prom and graduation season.

To belabor the obvious, the steps described on this blog that parents need to take to supervise their teen drivers are most important in the summer months.

I suppose we all aspire to be part of something bigger than ourselves, but yesterday was, by any measure, an experience on a different level.

I was invited by the National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS) to attend the launch of a ten-year international campaign to prevent five million traffic fatalities during the next ten years. The program called the “Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020.” The initiative was introduced in multiple locations around the United States and worldwide. As one would expect, safe teen driving is one of the “pillars” of the program, and thus I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility by being in attendance.

The international, long-term program coincides with May being National Youth Traffic Safety Month, which NOYS spearheads.

The first part of the Launch — on a spectacular spring morning, in a park on the north side of the U.S. Capital building — was led by the Hon. Norman Mineta, Chairman, Make Roads Safe North America, and U.S. Secretary of Transportation from 2001 to 2006. In addition, the campaign has recruited Grover from Sesame Street, because teaching important traffic safety messages to kids will be a critical part of the program’s bottom-up effort to change the culture around the world that has been, in too many cases, alarmingly indifferent to traffic safety. At the launch, Secretary Mineta was kind enough to introduce me and several other attendees who have lost a loved one in a traffic accident. So, in the photo that accompanies this post, you will find Secretary Mineta, Grover, and me. (I will assume that you can figure out who is who!)

After the morning launch, I participated in a Traffic Safety Expo in the Rayburn House Office Building, at which I was privileged to talk about this blog with the leadership of the national traffic safety community. We ended the day with a Congressional briefing on recent work by the Center for Disease Control and several leading research hospitals.

Overall, quite a day — the people assembled, the magnitude of the challenge ahead, and the honor of being able to make small contributions to an effort to save millions of lives.

My last post commented on an article in The New York Times entitled “New Lessons to Pave a Road to Safety” (April 18, 2011, by Tara Parker-Pope), which spotlighted recent research on the impacts of high school starting times on teen driver crash rates. This article also reviewed a recent study by Dr Dennis Durbin, co-director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which was published in the Journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention. I have commented several times previously about CHOP’s excellent teen driving website and its first-rate academic research.

I will try to do justice to Dr. Durbin’s article as summarized in the Times. His study attributes almost two-thirds of teen driver crashes to “three novice driving mistakes”: failing to scan the road, misjudging driving conditions, and becoming distracted. Specifically, Dr. Durbin calculated that 21 percent of crashes result from not conducting regular visual sweeps of the road ahead, not checking mirrors, not judging the speed of oncoming vehicles, and not realizing how large vehicles like trucks can block a driver’s view. The study ascribes another 21 percent of crashes to making incorrect assumptions about road conditions, such as whether curves are slippery when wet. Another 20 percent are attributed to distraction, ”not necessarily from a cell phone, but usually from another passenger in the car.”

So far so good. We can all be appreciative of academic research that quantifies the types of mistakes that lead teen drivers to crash. The article, however, goes on to offer advice about what parents should do in light of Dr. Durbin’s findings. The recommendations are: (1) “create programs that can help parents more intentionally” counteract these three causes; (2) let teens drive more frequently when road conditions are poor: and (3) engage in “narrative driving,” in which the adult drives while giving the teenage passenger a play-by-play of safe driving, such as why and when to change lanes, slow down, or check mirrors.

With all due respect, I disagree with this advice. It is a headfake, advice from an expert that can mislead a parent. The clear suggestion is that if parents will simply work with their teen drivers on scanning techniques, judging the speed of other cars, evaluating road conditions, and not being distracted — that is, vehicle handling techniques - then all will be well; their teens will be safe drivers. Not so.

The problem, as outlined in many other posts on this blog, starting with “There is No Such Thing As A Safe Teen Driver” (September 15, 2009), is that even dozens of hours of instruction focused intently on the three specific crash causes spotlighted by Dr. Durbin’s study cannot overcome three realities that make teen driving dangerous: the human brain does not fully appreciate risk and danger until we reach our early to mid-twenties; it takes three to five years of experience to learn to be a safe driver; and teens are learning to drive and navigate at the same time, which is very difficult (we train teens in compact cars on familiar local streets and then let them drive SUV’s and trucks to places they have never driven before). Concentrating on the three problems that the CHOP study so admirably highlights does not alleviate any of these root problems of high teen driver crash rates, and so I respectfully dissent from the suggestion to parents that if they will just take the time to focus on three specific vehicle handling skills, lower crash rates will follow. Would that it were that easy.

This issue is also laid out in my post entitled ”Why Driver’s Ed Matters — Except When It Doesn’t” (October 12, 2009). Obviously, instruction about how to handle a vehicle is essential for a young driver, but on the other hand, graduating from Driver’s Education class and following all of the rules of the road have been proven to make little difference in crash rates, because Driver’s Ed does not overcome the root problems either.

In summary, thank you to CHOP and to Dr. Durbin for their meticulous sleuthing and identification of the types of mistakes that predominate in teen driver crashes. However, parents, please don’t think that if we simply adjust our driving instruction to focus on the causes identified in this new study that we can then sit back and relax.