West Palm Beach Teen Crashes: Tips for Parents
For youth in Palm Beach County including Wellington, CityPark and all of South Florida, this is the season of spring break, prom and summer vacation. These exciting events have many young people in their cars on the road, which an accident lawyer knows can create a significant risk of accidents.
Parents must be aware of the dangers teens face behind the wheel and as passengers so they can make rules and take steps to ensure their safety throughout one of the busiest driving seasons of the year.
A large-scale study performed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic used naturalistic data to detect the truth behind teen driving accidents. This study was unique because it looked at video evidence in thousands of accidents. Past studies with naturalistic data have looked at only a small number of collisions.
Preventing Teen Crashes
One of the most important things parents can do to try to prevent their teenager from becoming involved in a motor vehicle accident is to address the issue of young passengers in a car with an inexperienced driver. Parents should both limit the number of friends a young driver can take in his vehicle with him and should restrict their children from getting into cars packed with young friends.
The risk of a crash for teens increases when there are one or more fellow teenagers in the car with an inexperienced driver. In a total of 36 percent of all crashes that teen drivers were involved in, there were passengers present. A total of 84 percent of these passengers were between the ages of 16 and 19. Drivers were found to have been conversing with their passengers in 15 percent of crashes.
Driver inattention was a factor in 44 percent of collisions where a teen driver lost control of a vehicle, as well as in 51 percent of T-bone or angle crashes and 89 percent of collisions where a vehicle left the road. Cell phone use was only a factor in a total of 12 percent of crashes. Visible use of a cell phone was detected in 21 percent of road-departure crashes and in 10 percent of rear-end accidents. Outside of cell phone use, passengers in the car was the other leading cause of potentially distracting behavior.
In addition to setting rules for teens about being in cars with lots of other young people, parents also need to stress with their children that it is important to travel at a safe speed and need to do driving practice with the kids. In 79 percent of single-vehicle accidents, AAA determined that the teen driver had been going too quickly for the conditions on the road at the time.
In total, there are more than 963,000 collisions, 383,000 injuries and 2,865 fatalities of teen drivers over the course of the year. If parents talk to their kids about these key issues, hopefully the number of young people dying or getting seriously hurt in accidents can be significantly reduced.
If you or a loved one is injured in a traffic accident, contact David J. Glatthorn at 800-990-9394 to discuss your rights. Serving Palm Beach County including Wellington, CityPark and all of South Florida.Â
