Tips to keep your teen safe on the road
There are a lot of young drivers at Palm Springs High School.
And some students say not all of them are focused when they’re behind the wheel.
“They’ll be texting or they’ll change the music,” said Thomas Wang, a Palm Springs High senior.
Wang said many of his friends are distracted drivers.
“It’s mostly like this: up, down, up, down,” Wang said as he scrolled through his cellphone.
Since it’s National Teen Driver Safety Week, Wang wants his peers to start paying better attention while they’re driving.
“I feel pretty powerless in the passenger seat because if you crash, there’s nothing I can really do about it, Wang said.”
Experts say one of the biggest distractions for teen drivers are cellphones.
“It takes about five seconds to read or send a text message,” said Doug Shupe of AAA. “Traveling at 55 mph, that’s like traveling the length of a football field blindfolded.”
Ship said new research shows that when teen drivers are riding with only teen passengers, the chances that a crash turns deadly increase dramatically.
“The fatality rate increases by more than 50 percent for everybody involved in that crash,” Shupe said, adding that everyone is responsible for making sure teen drivers are safe behind the wheel.
Wang, however, said that’s very difficult.
“I don’t want to be like, ‘Get off your phone,'” he said. “I mean, I, like will politely say it, but there’s only so much you can do because its their decisions.”
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