Читать книгу Safe Young Drivers: A Guide for Parents and Teens - Phil Berardelli - Страница 3

Being the author of Safe Young Drivers remains a rewarding and surprisingly challenging experience for me, now 15 years after I first completed the manuscript. Originally I had intended the book to be a relatively straightforward self-help tool for parents to give their teens a good start behind the wheel. Now it has evolved into a lifelong personal campaign to combat highway fatalities, which remain alarmingly high.

Consider just this one fact: During the five years beginning in March 2003, when the U.S. military invaded Iraq, until March 2008 as I write this new foreword, almost precisely 4,000 soldiers were killed in combat and related actions. But over that same time period, approximately 32,500 teenagers—more than eight times as many—died on our highways. A death on the road is just as sudden and just as violent as anything experienced in warfare, so we are talking about the violent death of children and young adults.

There are many reasons for this continuing tragedy, but one primary fault lies in the fact that our roads remain dangerous for everyone, and despite this environment many parents give in much too easily to pressure from their teens to obtain a driver’s license on or near their 16th birthday. Reluctantly or eagerly, many parents hand over the keys to their inadequately trained kids. They also give in to pressure to buy vehicles for teens right away—often, flashy and too-powerful vehicles.

Some parents even support beginning the teaching process as early as age 15. They rationalize that they’re giving their kids extra time to learn, and therefore it will make them better young drivers, even though no evidence supports this view.

To the contrary, after 12 years, the facts remain undeniable: Vehicle crashes still claim more teen lives than any other cause, and for the youngest drivers—the ones for whom I wrote this book—the toll remains the highest. Each day you spend using this book, 18 more teens, on average, will die on our highways. About 1,500 will be injured, some disabled for life.

Even worse, teens riding with teens constitute a recipe for disaster. A study by Johns Hopkins University revealed that a 16-year-old driver carrying one passenger is 39 percent more likely to die in a crash than when driving alone. That figure jumps to 86 percent with two passengers and 182 percent with three or more. Seventeen year olds fare nearly as badly.

Such information confirms that Safe Young Drivers is needed now just as much it was the day it was published. It is more than useful information—it is potentially life-saving information.

Since the original publication of the book, I have changed some of the instructional guidelines to reflect improved technology or the results of new research. For example, I now recommend a way of steering favored by driving-safety experts to reduce the chance of injury if the vehicle’s air bag deploys. Based on other discussions, I have changed my advice about where to position the rearview mirrors. I also have adjusted some of the recommended speeds for certain lessons.

I hope you will find this book useful, and I hope you will visit our Web site, www.safeyoungdrivers.com, and I welcome you to email your questions and comments to me at askphil@safeyoungdrivers.com.

Please tell others about Safe Young Drivers. Let’s all keep working to make our highways safer and keep our teens safer on the road.

Drive safely. Be a Lightfoot!