Teen Driving Safety

Important information for parents and teens about teaching a culture of safe driving from a study by Arthur Goodwin‚ Robert Foss‚ of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center is just beginning and I will keep you up to date on it’s finding.

Nearly every state now has a graduated driver licensing (GDL) system that requires adult supervision of beginning teen drivers for at least six months. This is a cost effective way to provide the large amount of practical driving experience that novices need to become safe drivers. However, most experts agree that there is room for improvement both in getting states to adopt more stringent versions of GDL (e.g., nighttime restriction at 9 PM rather than midnight), and in strengthening implementation.

Enhancing parental mentoring is seen as a promising way to improve GDL implementation; thus, a much better understanding of what actually happens during driving practice is needed.

This study was designed to learn more about how parents interact with their teens during driving practice when the teens are first learning to drive, and use this information to guide the development of materials to help parents be effective mentors for their teens. Using a series of in-depth interviews with parents as well as DriveCam in-vehicle cameras, this study will examine the interaction between parents and their teens during their teens’ first days, weeks, and months of learning to drive.

The study continues to monitor a subset of these teens through the first several months after they obtained their provisional license and began driving without supervision, providing a first-of-its-kind opportunity to relate the driving behaviors of newly licensed teens to information about the environment in which they learned to drive.

For this and all sorts of other information on Tennessee highway safety come to the web site of Phillip Miller & Associates and if you have any questions call 615-356-2000.

Teach Your Children Well

As an experienced Tennessee automobile accident attorney I regularly use my Blog “The Tennessee Auto Accident Attorney” to remind parents that ultimately it is their responsibility to oversee their teenagers driver training. Parental training isn’t only a couple of weekends in a vacant parking lot, or simply writing a check to a driver education company, parental training begins when your children are small. A good example, is a parent who uses seatbelts, drives the speed limit, yields to other drivers, is the most effective and lasting way to insure that your child will grow into a culture of safety.

On the other hand, a parent can assure that his/her child will grow up with utter disregard for others on the highways and byways. Reference an article on the website of the Kingsport Times-News about a young man drag racing in a hopped up Mustang with a man in a Corvette. The race went wrong when the young man in the Mustang lost control, went airborne, and rolled through a busy parking lot striking and damaging several vehicles. Through the grace of God no one was killed.

The Corvette driver fled the scene, but the irony is that the Corvette belonged to the Mustang boys father. Police believe the father and son were drag racing. Back to what I was saying earlier about parental guidance and good examples, what kind of parent flees the scene of a violent accident involving their child. This parent is definitely a candidate for the “Worst Tennessee Driver of 2010”.

If you, a family member, or a loved one is injured or killed in a Tennessee automobile accident by a driver like either one of these two bozos you owe it to yourself to contact the experienced Tennessee automobile accident attorneys at Phillip Miller & Associates and take advantage of a free consultation to learn about your rights and remedies.