Keeping Teens Safe on the Road

Feb. 13, 2005 -- -- For some people concerned about highway safety, the key to getting teenagers to drive more responsibly is to take away the gadgets that distract them from the road; others, though, say more technology is just the way to keep them thinking about what they're doing behind the wheel.

Lawmakers in more than a dozen states are considering bills to ban cell phone use by teenaged drivers -- even the hands-free phones that are allowed in places where using hand-held phones is illegal for drivers of any age.

At the same time, marketers are pushing GPS technology as a tool for parents to keep tabs on their teen drivers, touting the technology's ability to alert parents when a car is driven faster than a designated speed or outside of a designated area.

"It's almost like having a parent in the back seat," said James Sapp of Atlanta, who markets GPS tracking systems directed at parents concerned about their teenagers' driving. "If the kids in the back seat are saying, 'Let's see what this baby can do,' the kid's going to go, 'If I do that, my dad's going to know. He's liable to take the car away from me for a month.' "

That of course assumes that parents are ready to make that kind of a threat, and follow through with the punishment.

For James Winfield, who runs the DriveHomeSafe.com Web site from his Salem, Ore., home, the answer for concerned parents is less about technology and more about taking a common sense approach. He tells parents to talk to their kids more, pay closer attention to how they drive and how they behave in cars, and not to assume that because their children have passed their driver's test they are ready for anything on the road.

That the problem needs attention is obvious from a look at statistics regarding teenagers and driving. Though teen driving deaths have declined over the last 30 years, teenagers still die in cars at higher rates than any other group, and auto accidents are by far the leading killer of children.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, teenagers accounted for 10 percent of the population and 15 percent of the motor vehicle occupant fatalities in 2003. Of all the teenagers who died in car crashes, 59 percent died in cars driven by other teenagers, and another 21 percent died in cars driven by people 20 to 24 years old.