Teens Learn Dangers of Texting While Driving During National Teen Safe Driver Week

David Mittleman

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Congress has designated this week as National Teen Safe Driver Week. To help promote teen and young adult driving safety, the Michigan State Police recently offered local college students the opportunity to learn firsthand the dangers of driving while texting. On Monday, the Michigan State Police offered a demonstration on a precision track. The police supervisor, Sergeant James Flegel, instructed the students to text while attempting to maneuver around orange cones, which were representative of the cars and pedestrians they would normally encounter while driving. The demonstration, planned and offered by the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning, was designed to show the dangers of using a cell phone, particularly to text, while driving.

National Teen Safe Driver Week was inspired by a recent Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study. In the study, the researchers used cameras to monitor the drivers of semitrailer trucks and their texting habits. Overall, the results showed that the risk of crash is 23 times greater when texting while driving. While the study did not look at how text messaging affects people driving cars, SUVs, or pickups, the results did find that dialing a cell phone caused the driver of any of these three types of vehicles to triple their risk of an accident.

According to the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning, traffic crashes are the top killer of people between the ages of 16 and 20. Specifically, just last year 174 people were killed in crashes involving 16 to 20 year-olds. Furthermore, 106 out of the 174 of those killed were people between the ages of 16 and 20. While it is unclear what role cell phone use played in these accidents, students, such as 19-year-old Ciara Hines, admit that they knocked over nearly every orange cone on the precision course while driving and texting.