Teaching your teen good driving habits can be an endless, nerve-wracking pain in the driver’s seat. Even with insurance or internet-supplied GPS units, you can’t tell if your child is doing 50 mph on the road or 50 mph in a parking lot. Quest Driving Safety says it has the solution: a tail.
For $99 you can hire a retired or off-duty police officer to covertly follow your teen, making note of bad driving habits.
First, customers fill out an online form telling Quest what kind of car their teen drives, where to find them and when. After that, they receive a Parent-Teen Driving Agreement in the mail. It’s suggested that you look over the form with your teen and tell them that an evaluation is coming up. However, we’d bet that many of the parents go completely Black Ops on their kid and don’t tell them at all.
Quest driving evaluators find the car and wait for the teen to start driving. Each evaluation takes about 15-20 minutes. The evaluator returns with notes for the parents, including how the driver acted when pedestrians were near, in construction zones and how closely they followed the car in front. Gary Lawrence, CEO of Quest Driving Safety, notes that these are things that insurance GPS units can’t record.
“We ask the officer, if you were on duty, would you write a ticket,” said Lawrence. “And they make note of that in the file.”
The service isn’t just for teens. Quest Driving Safety will follow senior citizen relatives and even business fleets, looking for proper driving etiquette. A big portion of the senior business comes from families who live far away from their grown-up parents, and can’t accurately gauge their driving ability. Currently that accounts for about 30 percent of the firm’s business, the rest is teens.
Quest covers the bigger metropolitan areas of all 50 states, and some smaller cities in more populous areas. Check out the website at www.questdrivingsafety.com or call 800-868-5254 for more information.
Special thanks to autoweek.com.
Among the unsafe behaviors teen drivers display behind the wheel, nodding off while driving – which hasn’t received nearly enough attention – ranks right up there as potentially deadly.
Now, a new study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety finds that one in seven licensed drivers ages 16 to 24 admitted to nodding off at least one time during the past year. Compared to one in 10 of all licensed drivers who said they’d fallen asleep at the wheel, the AAA data shows young drivers more likely to engage in this dangerous behavior.
In fact, the recent findings mirror what the AAA found in a 2010 study of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) crash data that showed this age group 78 percent more likely to be drowsy when involved in a crash than 40- to 49-year-old drivers.
The NHTSA data revealed that one in six deadly crashes involved drivers who had fallen asleep at the wheel, making drowsy driving a leading crash contributor.
Effects of driving drowsy
While eight out of 10 people consider drowsy drivers to be a threat to their personal safety, many of them also confess to driving that way themselves. Some 30 percent admitted to driving during the past month while they were so sleepy that they could hardly keep their eyes open.
With Thanksgiving approaching and the Christmas season right behind, young drivers will be pushing their driving limits to get home for the holidays. “Unfortunately, most drivers underestimate the risks associated with drowsy driving and overestimate their ability to deal with it,” said Peter Kissinger, AAA Foundation President and CEO, in a release. “That’s a dangerous combination.”
Research shows that driving while drowsy or tired can significantly impact driving ability, causing slower reaction times, judgment lapses, and impaired vision.
Warning signs
How do you know when a person is literally too tired to drive and/or already driving while drowsy? The AAA Foundation encourages parents to discuss the following warning signs with their teenage drivers and for the teens to monitor themselves and take precautions when any are present:
- Difficulty keeping eyes open and focused
- Frequent yawning and eye-rubbing
- Trouble remembering the last few miles driven and missing exits and traffic signs
- Daydreaming and wandering or disconnected thoughts
- Drifting out of the lane or off the road
There are some steps a drowsy driver of any age can take to ensure that they don’t become a victim of a crash or injure or kill others by driving while too fatigued. While we’ve covered these tips before, they bear repeating.
- Get sufficient sleep. Any lengthy trip should be preceded by a good night’s sleep. Experts recommend at least seven hours.
- Don’t eat heavy meals. When your stomach is overloaded with too much food, your system wants to naturally shut down, causing you to want to go to sleep. Eat lightly to prevent this from occurring. Save the heavy meal for after you arrive at your destination.
- Be smart about when you drive. It only stands to reason that you’d be better off driving during the daylight hours when you’d normally be awake. For that reason, avoid driving at times when you’d usually be sleeping.
- Take time for a break. Mile after mile on the road, for a person already tired, only serves to exacerbate the problem. It’s too easy to just drift off for a few seconds, which can prove deadly. Instead of pushing through, trying to get to your destination faster, stop and take a break every two hours or around 100 miles. Get out of the car and take a short walk, get a hot coffee, or maybe a snack. This will help you recharge somewhat and be better able to remain alert and in control behind the wheel.
- Forego medications before driving. Unless it’s absolutely medically necessary, don’t take medications – especially those that cause drowsiness – before driving.
- Bring along another driver. If at all possible, travel with a companion who is also a licensed driver so that you can switch off when you become too tired to continue.
Want more tips on how to improve safety on the road and avoid drowsy driving. Visit the National Sleep Foundation website, DrowsyDriving.org.
10 Tips To Help Your Teen Stop Texting And Driving
Texting while driving is considered the most distracting driver behavior, increasing crash risk by 2,300 percent. Yet it is also one of the most difficult behaviors to curtail, especially among young, first-time drivers.
A recent article in Minnesota Public Radio News caught our attention, so we thought we’d pass along some of it here, along with two tips of our own.
As parents, there are some things that you can and should do to help your teen be a safer and more responsible driver. Take note of these ten tips to help your teen stop texting and driving.
- Be a good example. Whether you realize it or not, your young teen who’s of driving age is watching you like a hawk every time you’re behind the wheel. If you engage in distracted driving behavior such as texting or talking on your cell phone, don’t think your actions are going unnoticed. The best solution is to display the kind of behavior that you want your teen to model when driving. This may take some practice and discipline on your part, especially if you have been guilty of texting and driving or talking on the cell phone and driving in the past. Maybe you never gave it much thought until your child reached driving age. Now is a good time to start acting responsibly so your children pick up on it.
- You make the rules. You are the parents, after all, so what you set down as the family rules regarding acceptable driving behavior should have an impact. Your children should know that there are consequences for breaking the rules, especially the one about texting while driving. Think carefully what those consequences will be and be sure to discuss them with your children so there are no misunderstandings about what will be okay and what is absolutely unacceptable.
- Observe your teen driving (with you in the car). One of the best ways to know how your teen behaves behind the wheel is to be a passenger in the car and watch how he or she handles situations. Spend as much time as possible with your teen during the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) phase and gently correct any bad habits.
- No reading or sending texts at stop lights. Your teenage driver may be under the mistaken impression that it’s okay to dash off a quick text or read an incoming text when stopped at a traffic signal. Make it very clear to them that this is against the law as well as being extremely unsafe behavior.
- Have your teen watch a video of the aftermath of teen texting and driving. Nothing says how dangerous texting while driving can be like a video that shows the tragic aftermath. While the human carnage, thankfully, isn’t visibly displayed, the wreckage and interviews with survivors and the injured should be enough to get the message across that this is extremely dangerous behavior.
- Check out apps to monitor your teen in the car. Sometimes this kind of “snooping” is reasonable and acceptable. Look into apps that allow you to lock out texting and cell phone use when driving as well as those that permit you to view your teen’s cell phone activity. Let your teen know that you will be monitoring their behavior. They’ll be more likely to abide by the rules.
- Insist they leave the phone in the trunk or back seat (unavailable). You can’t expect your teen to leave the house without their phone, but you can insist that while they are behind the wheel that the phone stays in the trunk or in the back seat. If it is unavailable to them, they’re less likely to use it. Of course, if the phone is in the car, it needs to be turned off or muted. An app that plays an automatic message that says the person is driving and will get back to them later is an excellent solution.
- Talk about how you’d feel if they died. This suggestion may sound a bit extreme, but like watching the video of the aftermath of texting and driving, it gets the point across.
- Ask if that text is worth dying for. The tendency for teens to instantly respond to an incoming text is tough to overcome. But the truth is that it is only a message that can wait. Be direct and ask your teen if that text – any text – is worth dying for. This sobering thought should help them think better about texting behind the wheel.
- Take away driving privileges for breaking the rules. Remember those rules you laid down about driving behavior? They’re only as good as your willingness to back them up when your teen breaks them. The consequences for violating the rules have to be significant – and you have to enforce them. For example, teens cherish their mobility. If they text and drive, a logical penalty is to take away driving privileges for a certain period of time. That will get their attention, if nothing else will.
