Posted on 04/18/2014 12:46:52 PM PDT by bkopto
Adolescent drivers are often distracted by technology while they are driving, but loud conversations and horseplay between passengers appear more likely to result in a dangerous incident, according to a new study from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center.
The work, which appears online today in the Journal of Adolescent Health, not only reinforces the importance of North Carolina’s licensing system for newly minted drivers but also provides an interesting perspective on the role that technology plays in distracted driving.
“Forty three states currently restrict newly licensed drivers from having more than one young passenger in their vehicle,” said Robert Foss, senior research scientist at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, and director of the Center for the Study of Young Drivers. “The results of this study illustrate the importance of such restrictions, which increase the safety of drivers, their passengers and others on the road by reducing the potential chaos that novice drivers experience.”
In their work, Foss and his colleague Arthur Goodwin recruited 52 North Carolina high-school age drivers to have in-vehicle cameras mounted in their cars and trucks to observe distracted driving behaviors and distracted conditions when teen drivers were behind the wheel. Young drivers were recorded in a variety of real-world driving situations over six months — with parents in the car, with other teens in the car and alone.
The study shows that young drivers were less likely to use cell phones and other technology (including in-vehicle systems, like the radio and temperature control) when there were passengers in the car with them. But having multiple passengers in the car more often led to more serious incidents. Teen drivers were six times more likely to have a serious incident when there was loud conversation in the vehicle — to the point of needing to make an evasive maneuver to avoid a crash — and three times more likely to have a serious incident when there was horseplay in the vehicle.
Another important finding is that actions the driver alone controls – reaching, texting, using a phone and eating — seem less likely to lead to a serious incident than things they can’t control, like how others in the car behave.
“This is why the limit of one teen passenger is important when teens are just learning to drive,” said Foss.
We all come from a long line of survivors. What are the odds of that?
It’s hard to believe that as a teen in Houston, I used to hang my six pack of beer off my outside mirror to keep it cooler, as I drove all over the city.
I think back to the activities of crawling from one car to another on the freeway, or changing front and back seats over the roof at 75 mph, or the blindfolded driver taking directions from the passenger, or two of us hooking arms on the roof and inside the windows, and the driving seeing if he could lose us, that was done both on city streets and the freeway. Constantly towing our broken down teenager cars with chains and drinking beer while doing it, the list goes on and on.
I would never had made it with today’s laws.
“Gees it has been the same since I was a teen in the ‘60s! We were crazy!”
I think it goes back further than that. A friend of miner’s Dad upset all the hoity toities in town for speeding through town with his wagon and team of horses.
LOL
It used to be reaching out the window of a slow moving car and whacking a mailbox with a bat that was distracting to us.
Or, I mean, my friends....
““horseplay”? I haven’t heard that term for awhile. Is the author in his 90’s?”
maybe he didn’t know how to spell shenanigans! :)
Today, I'm here to tell you that in another twenty years, teenage drivers will be involved in fatal car crashes because they were masturbating with their pants down to streaming 3D video pornography projected on the inside of the windshield while the automatic driverless-car they were riding in inadvertantly drove over a cliff or smack-dab through a residential home, ejecting the body of the pants-less masturbator from the vehicle.
It'll happen with enough frequency that President Chelsea Clinton will sign an executive order to spend 120,000,000 Yuan on a national campaign to curtail driving while masturbating. Anyone our age giggling at the absurdity of it all will be regarded as an 'anti-Unisexist' prude.
Laugh now, believe me later.
we had to drive to school 5 miles every day in rain and snow, with no power steering, no air conditioning and only AM radio with one speaker. And we liked it.
Why I'd have a Salem in one hand and a RC Cola in the other with Led Zep blasting out of the dash and four other guys yelling out the windows at the dolts who rode the bus..... we did hit that one house but it weren't our fault
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